[1nst1nct1ve]

So I am putting together a new rig for gaming and was curious about if SSD's in raid would yield any "real world" performance gains?

I was looking at these drives:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227725

They already have a 525 read speed.
If I were to go with a raid configuration for 120GB I would pay around 200 bucks, whereas a 120GB drive would only cost me 160, saving me 40 dollars to put toward a better GPU. Were talking a 560 448 core 1gb vs a 570 1280mb.

Let's take world of warcraft for example since that game does a lot of loading for zones, instances, etc.

How much of a performance increase in load times would I see with a raid set up vs a single drive? Would it be noticeable?

 

[DSP1]

Would recommend against RAID 0 when not absolutely necessary. The improvement in loading would be minimal. And you run the risk of data loss due to drive failure. As with RAID 0 should only one of the drives fail all data is lost. And the more drives you use the higher your chances of a drive failure.

 

[Darkslayer7]

SSD raid ? no .
HDD rain ? Yes .

If you raid SSD's than the idle garbage collection will not work , and your raid will slow down drastically over time .
Raid is still best for HDD's !

 

[1nst1nct1ve]

Thank's for the quick responses!
I was thinking that already but you guys just confirmed it!
GTX 570, here I come

 

[Riou]

Just get a single large 120GB SSD. Then use that money towards a better graphics card.

 

[Chris13002]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darkslayer7

SSD raid ? no .
HDD rain ? Yes .
If you raid SSD's than the idle garbage collection will not work , and your raid will slow down drastically over time .
Raid is still best for HDD's !

You lose TRIM, and still have Garbage Collection...
Also Intel soon will release TRIM Raid controllers hopefully soon...

Also with SSD's, it's basically an 100% increase for scaling, while mechanical are no where close...
My two RAIDED SSD's are faster than anything i would use it for, 450MB sequential reads...

Also I trust my older SSD's over mechanicals anyday as they've been running over 3 years strong...
Can't really say that about the newer and much faster SSD's...

But I agree, that a single fast SSD is the way to go...

 

[Boomstick68]

I have a raid 0 array and my TRIM is still enabled.

 

[Murlocke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boomstick68

I have a raid 0 array and my TRIM is still enabled.

Enabled, but not supported/working. There is a big difference.

There's no controller on the market that supports raid 0 and TRIM, so it is not working for you. I'd really recommend taking them out of Raid 0, your drives will get slower and slower.

 

[Danylu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DSP1

Would recommend against RAID 0 when not absolutely necessary. The improvement in loading would be minimal. And you run the risk of data loss due to drive failure. As with RAID 0 should only one of the drives fail all data is lost. And the more drives you use the higher your chances of a drive failure.

True in theory, but in practise I've used my current RAID 0 setup for 4 years and I've run out of hard drive space now before my array has started to die. It's good enough for me.

EDIT: Here is an older comparison of RAID 0 vs 1 HDD

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Does-RAID0-Really-Increase-Disk-Performance/

 

[Jackirwin]

im using 2 force 3 120gb in raid and ive noticed windows boot is far slower than when i was using 1 of them but gaming and other things would be slightly faster so i dont think its worth your while doing raid in ssd

 

[tompsonn]

The next 11.5 release of RST will include TRIM support for SSDs in RAID 0

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_bringing_trim_support_raid0_rst_115

 

[Murlocke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jackirwin

im using 2 force 3 120gb in raid and ive noticed windows boot is far slower than when i was using 1 of them but gaming and other things would be slightly faster so i dont think its worth your while doing raid in ssd

Raid 0 negatively affects somethings, but increases sustained speeds. It's great for mechanical drives but bad for SSDs since they already have extremely overkill sustained speeds. You are basically allowing the drive to be faster in 10% of situations, and slower in the other 90%. Even if TRIM was working on SSDs I wouldn't recommend it because of this. No household user needs anywhere near that fast of sustained speeds, people don't exactly transfer massive amounts of data from drive to drive every day. The only way someone is going to utilize the max sustained speeds of a good SSD, is to have another fast SSD and transfer inbetween them.. so there's no reason to make it even faster at the cost of negatively affecting more important stats.

When TRIM hits, the only real reason I see to Raid 0 on SSDs would be for more space on a single partition. Seeing as a 256GB M4 is cheaper than 2x 128GB M4, I really don't see any reason to use it.

 

[mad0314]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

Raid 0 negatively affects somethings, but increases sustained speeds. It's great for mechanical drives but bad for SSDs since they already have extremely overkill sustained speeds. You are basically allowing the drive to be faster in 10% of situations, and slower in the other 90%. Even if TRIM was working on SSDs I wouldn't recommend it because of this. No household user needs anywhere near that fast of sustained speeds, people don't exactly transfer massive amounts of data from drive to drive every day.

And yet people post their massive speeds of their RAID 0 SSDs when talking about a boot drive... random reads are whats most important for that, followed by all the other small files.

 

[Murlocke]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mad0314

And yet people post their massive speeds of their RAID 0 SSDs when talking about a boot drive... random reads are whats most important for that, followed by all the other small files.

Sadly, the majority of people still think sustained speed is what makes a drive faster/slower.

In truth, it means almost absolutely nothing for a boot drive unless the user has a identically fast storage drive that he constantly transfers to and from.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Danylu

True in theory, but in practise I've used my current RAID 0 setup for 4 years and I've run out of hard drive space now before my array has started to die. It's good enough for me.
EDIT: Here is an older comparison of RAID 0 vs 1 HDD
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Does-RAID0-Really-Increase-Disk-Performance/

OP is talking about raid 0 with SSDs. Totally seperate can of worms over HDDs.

 

[mcg75]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

Sadly, the majority of people still think sustained speed is what makes a drive faster/slower.

In truth, it means almost absolutely nothing for a boot drive unless the user has a identically fast storage drive that he constantly transfers to and from.

It's hard to convince them otherwise when sequential speed is what the ssd makers print first for specs. But they never tell you how little time will be spent using sequential.

Look at the OCZ Solid 3 for instance. Advertised with the big 500/500 transfer rates with Atto. But they don't tell you that the compressible data that Atto uses is nonexistant in the real world. All data is compressed to a point. So you run a real benchmark with as-ssd and look at how poor the 4k numbers are and wonder what the point was of releasing a drive slower than last generation drives for everyday use. But the average person doesn't know how ssd works so they get fooled.

I'm glad to see someone else mention the fact that without a drive that can provide data as fast as you can write it, sequential is darn near useless. You simply can't write at 500mb/s unless something is feeding it the data at 500mb/s. This is the reason why so many tech sites do the copy from folder to folder on the same ssd to see it's read and write.

 

[Danylu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

Sadly, the majority of people still think sustained speed is what makes a drive faster/slower.

In truth, it means almost absolutely nothing for a boot drive unless the user has a identically fast storage drive that he constantly transfers to and from.
OP is talking about raid 0 with SSDs. Totally seperate can of worms over HDDs.

Oops.

 

[Computurd]

RAID 0 for advanced users who do big time multitasking and semi-pro computer work or upward.

single device for normal users.

 

[psyside]

let me explain this for my perspective.

4 days ago, i was extracting 6GB of data, packed in RAR.

When i start the process, like i always do, i tried to surf a bit so i wont be waiting and looking at the screen

And guess what happened? my pc was very slow! t this is because when you extracting or write/installing large programs, your SSD is using all of its sequential write speed, (+ reads ofc) and launching programs in the same time resulted in very slow system, there was like 20 seconds delay when i tried to launch Chrome, Malwarebytes etc...

Now i'm not sure if this is because my C300 has only 140MB/s as max lets say 130 on average, or its normal whenever you install some quite big programs/games or extracting large rar files? so in this regard, SSD Raid0 should do alot better no?

Long story short, im power user, who hate to be limited in any possible way! i dont care if i should wait during the installation, i dont want to! i want to get max from my system no matter what i do, and to see that i get very very slow system during whatever task im doing it makes me frustrated, after all its [email protected] and 8GB of ram + SSD, so yea if anyone can confirm this finding or its willing to do similar test in order to examine this possible slow downs let me know please! thanks.

 

[CallsignVega]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Murlocke

Raid 0 negatively affects somethings, but increases sustained speeds. It's great for mechanical drives but bad for SSDs since they already have extremely overkill sustained speeds. You are basically allowing the drive to be faster in 10% of situations, and slower in the other 90%. Even if TRIM was working on SSDs I wouldn't recommend it because of this. No household user needs anywhere near that fast of sustained speeds, people don't exactly transfer massive amounts of data from drive to drive every day. The only way someone is going to utilize the max sustained speeds of a good SSD, is to have another fast SSD and transfer inbetween them.. so there's no reason to make it even faster at the cost of negatively affecting more important stats.
When TRIM hits, the only real reason I see to Raid 0 on SSDs would be for more space on a single partition. Seeing as a 256GB M4 is cheaper than 2x 128GB M4, I really don't see any reason to use it.

Slower in 90% of situations? I'd disagree, and so would storage reviews:

http://www.storagereview.com/crucial_m4_ssd_raid_review

Both the Crucial M4 and Samsung 830 were easily faster in 90% of tests in Raid 0 versus single drive counterparts. The other 10% is in some 4k benchmarks, but the real world benchmarks still come out far ahead on the Raid 0 setup.

 

[Hogwasher]

I have RAID 0 Kingstons for what seems like a couple of years now and while sustained writes have went down everything else is holding strong. a 95% improvement over a single drive in benchmarks.

In real life usage there isn't any real preceviable difference between single or Raid.