1x 850 Pro 500GB or 2x 850 Pro 250 GB?

[Deleted member 1218011]

This would be for a mostly gaming machine which is also used, to a lesser extent, for system administration. I am currently using a Crucial MX100 512 GB and find it extremely good (again, being used mostly for gaming it means that the slower write speed doesn't really bother me that much as read speeds are very good). However, this has now been replaced by the MX200, so if I were to buy another MX100 today for RAID, I would basically pay the same price that I paid last year :/

So I was looking at either the 850 Pro or the 850 Evo. I don't really need more than 500 GB as everything else is on my server and/or on my NAS, but I cannot decide between a single 500 GB or 2 250 GB drives in RAID 0.

Performance-wise (especially looking at the slightly worse performance of the smaller drives) would it make much of an impact to use two slower drives in RAID vs 1 single, faster drive?

What would you do? I am ideally looking for somebody who has tried both approaches.

 

[Reyaz123]

Yes it would be faster. In theory, 250gbX2 should be faster since raid 0 doubles the speed of your read/write to a disk.

 

[Deleted member 1218011]

Yes it would be faster. In theory, 250gbX2 should be faster since raid 0 doubles the speed of your read/write to a disk.

Would it be noticeably faster? I mean, the performance difference between a single 250 drive and a 500 drive is probably not going to be noticeable in real-world usage, but I am hoping a RAID0 will be worth the price 😛

 

[Reyaz123]

I tested it out myself on a virtual machine, and two slow hard drives in a raid 0 array were very close and identical to the speeds of a ssd drive. Clearly outperformed the single new hard drive speed

I found a post here you may want to check out comparing raid 0 to an ssd, and single hard drive
http://www.gameplayinside.com/optimize/gaming-storage-shootout-2015-ssd-hdd-or-raid-0-which-is-best/

 

[mad-max79]

Go for single drive solution, RAID often causing trouble, and important IO speed don't increase much, also many tools don't work with RAID.
You won't feel any speed increase.

 

[rolldogg]

Read this article. It's quite lengthy, but I think you'll see that there is a huge speed difference between the 256GB and the 512GB drives. Also, the new Samsung 850 EVO drives use 3D TLC NAND technology, which makes it just as fast as the 850 pros. I ordered 2 850 Pros Friday night to setup in a RAID0 configuration, but Saturday morning, I saw where Newegg was having a deal on these 850 EVO drives ($150ea) so I cancelled my order on the Pros, and I bought 2 850 EVO drives and a WD 3TB Red Drive for less than 2 850 Pros.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review