[DimmyK]

Hi all. I have a question to SSD specialists. A little introduction.

Recently I jumped on a very good deal for Corsair refurb 128GB SSD (older Indilinx controller), since I though I could use some more space for my steam games.

Before it my storage setup was like this

- Everything is sitting on ICH10 south bridge
- 2 Vertex 60GB SSDs in RAID 0 (Drive C, boot, for work related stuff)
- 2 Seagate 1TB 7200RPM HDDs in RAID 1 (backup of boot array, data files)
- Kingston 96GB SSD for steam games (not a member of any RAID array)

Now, with another SSD just for steam games (also, not a member of RAID array), I dint want to have two separate drives (existing Kingston and new Corsair) and fiddle with sym links when one drive becomes full. I wanted to have a single volume (96GB + 128GB) that will hold all my games in one place. So I read up on spanning disks in windows 7 (never done that before) and decided to proceed with that approach.

I successfully created a single volume (208GB formatted) from said two SSD drives. Everything looks good, I ran a couple tests to see the performance.

Kingston 96GB single


Corsair 128GB single


2 drives spanned into single volume E


Now, to the point:

1. Is there any severe downside of spanning two different SSDs, which perform quite similarly, into single volume performance and stability wise?
2. What about TRIM? Both drives support it. Can someone knowledgeable confirm/reject the notion that Windows will be able to pass TRIM commands to both SSDs in said configuration?

Your replies are appreciated in advance.

Thanks.

 

[Computurd]

there is no trim for spanning unfortunately.
the only downside is that you are running into risks if one device fails, you lose both as they share the same filetables. I wouldn't see an issue with it personally, as long as you stay up on your backups.

 

[Mhill2029]

No, you will lose TRIM support.

 

[Sean Webster]

Quote:

Originally Posted by DimmyK

Hi all. I have a question to SSD specialists. A little introduction.

Recently I jumped on a very good deal for Corsair refurb 128GB SSD (older Indilinx controller), since I though I could use some more space for my steam games.

Before it my storage setup was like this

- Everything is sitting on ICH10 south bridge
- 2 Vertex 60GB SSDs in RAID 0 (Drive C, boot, for work related stuff)
- 2 Seagate 1TB 7200RPM HDDs in RAID 1 (backup of boot array, data files)
- Kingston 96GB SSD for steam games (not a member of any RAID array)

Now, with another SSD just for steam games (also, not a member of RAID array), I dint want to have two separate drives (existing Kingston and new Corsair) and fiddle with sym links when one drive becomes full. I wanted to have a single volume (96GB + 128GB) that will hold all my games in one place. So I read up on spanning disks in windows 7 (never done that before) and decided to proceed with that approach.

I successfully created a single volume (208GB formatted) from said two SSD drives. Everything looks good, I ran a couple tests to see the performance.

Now, to the point:

1. Is there any severe downside of spanning two different SSDs, which perform quite similarly, into single volume performance and stability wise?
2. What about TRIM? Both drives support it. Can someone knowledgeable confirm/reject the notion that Windows will be able to pass TRIM commands to both SSDs in said configuration?

Your replies are appreciated in advance.

Thanks.

Well
1. The only downside I see is that the spanned volume cannot be mirrored and is not fault-tolerant. Otherwise its good to go.
2. I have no idea for sure, I found an answer here saying it does.

 

[DimmyK]

Thanks all for the replies. I don't really care about no-fault tolerance on that particular volume, so that's good news that no other downsides are apparent. Loosing TRIM on the other hand sucks. Oh, well... Since I idle my PC overnight once a week anyway (for garbage collect to work on my boot array), I guess two other SSDs will be cleaned by their GC as well.

 

[gooddog]

Yes, as noted, you do lose trim.
However, you still have garbage collection and that seems to be good enough.
There were some analysis of this for the crucial C300 in raid 0 that showed that GC was good enough.