Samsung F3 1TB Raid 0 HDtune Result

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The solid state still performs faster? I cant believe that. Especially when it comes to write speed the RAID should blow it out of the water!

So when I stroke my RAID0 to 10% is that of the total 2TB or is that from the 1TB

You don't short stroke to increase your read speeds. You short stroke to decrease your access times.

OS use generally requires lots of random I/O - so SSDs are king here. No mechanical disk setup can touch them. Once your sequential read speed is above say 100MB/s there is no difference any more - it is the random perfromance that matters.

As stated, if you only use the extra space on the disk for rarely used files then there is no problem. But if you EVER use a file on the 'slow' partition you force the read heads to track across the platter to reach that file - and this takes time. Exactly the time you are trying to reduce by short stroking in the first place. Using it for media storage is not so bad really, as the odd seek to read an mp3 will not have much impact, and you are unlikely to be doing anything else with your PC while watching a movie. Backup images are also a good choice to store on the extra space. But putting your games on the inner partition is a poor idea - the heads will spend time tracking back and forth between your partitions, taking more time than they would do if you just installed everything in a single partition, as the data will be further spread across the disk surface. No benchmark can show you this, and it is irrelevant what a bench of each individual array/partition shows you. Most OSes constantly read & write to the HDD, loading shared libraries & other background tasks etc, so even while gaming you still need OS access - and this is why short stroking and using the extra space for this type of data is a poor idea.

Now if you do video editing or other applications that do sustained, sequential reads or writes, then a high speed RAID0 array will blow away a single SSD - because now the raw sequential rate is most important. Some games also benefit from this as they load large textures.

There is no 'best' way to do storage - you have to tailor your setup to your usage. Synthetic benchmarks are also almost entirely useless to determine the fastest setup for any given situation. Mainly because most people don't know or don't understand the tests they are running and the results presented to them.

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Great insight.

How about if you partition 250-500GB on a RAID0 1TB setup where the OS and applications are on the same partition while the rest is used for storage. Does it still suffer the same effect?

I think 500GB would be to much to see any real benefit in seek times. I'd use the OS needs, your programs etc, the most played game. Say 100GB would be more than enough.

I use the 2nd partition only for storage at the minute whilst running various tests as I don't need the space. I've installed a few games on there and run (mostly Grid v1.3) and not noticed any improvements to load times be it on the OS drive or the storage drive.

I've next to test Crysis load level times, again one on the OS drive and one on the storage. I doubt there will be any difference in actual loading of the level, as once the level is loading, the OS ain't going to be doing much else. If there is, it will negligible i'd guess.

If you use the 2nd partition (the slow one) and also access the OS drive at regular intervals, then you will gain nothing.