Best combination of SSD and RAID with Marvell HyperDuo

[Christopher L]

So I'm building a computer (first build! and am going to be using a RAID controller with Marvell HyperDuo support. I have two SSDs (a 60 GB and a 120 GB, both about the same speed) and 3 hard drives. Capacity really isn't a problem for me (the HDDs are 80 GBs each, they're older but got them from work so they're 10,000 RPM) but I can't just use 180 GBs... So, I'm trying to figure out what would give me the best performance in terms of booting up/system performance etc. between using both SSDs in RAID (0) with two HDDs or using the 120 GB SSD with three HDDs in RAID and putting Windows on the 60 GB SSD. (I don't have a problem with managing multiple drives on Windows) In other words, will putting both SSDs in RAID (with HDDs) give an overall speed higher than using one SSD? Any insight would be appreciated.

Edit: Thanks for the input, but still trying to figure this out, as I'll be using RAID because I'm trying to learn it for my job/career. Also I'm putting Windows Server on this machine, not primarily for gaming.

 

[Snipergod87]

SSD's in the same RAID array with the HDD's will slow things down significantly. You would be much better off with a single SSD for booting, and using the mechanical hdd's in either RAID 0 or RAID 5 (if you want parity) and use the other SSD for storage.

You could put the two SSD's in RAID 0 but you will lose 60GB of space, and honestly you wont notice the performance difference besides bench marking, and depending on your RAID controller and drivers TRIM may not function if the SSD's are in an array which results in lower performance as time progresses.

 

[Traciatim]

Personally I would just put my OS and an app or two on the 60GB SSD, put the games you want to run nice and quick on the 120GB SSD, and sell the HDD's and buy a 1TB 7200RPM drive for storage or anything that you don't really care how fast it runs. RAID is generally more frustration than its' worth . . . it has some good specific uses, but consumer level gaming machines generally aren't one of them.

 

[gaymer1984]

In a sense there is almost no point RAIDing good SSDs because they are already using the maximum throughput on one device with read and write (though artificial benchmarks will give you much lower scores on read/write speeds) but if you are looking for absolutely the best scenario possible, you may eliminate some of the sags in read/write speeds by using the 2 in a striped raid array. There is no point RAIDing an SSD with 2 mechanical hard drives, we're talking orders of magnitude of difference between ones' access time and the other. This is why RAID devices are usually advised as being the same part in a setup, because otherwise you will be introducing bottlenecks rather than exploiting speed.

180gb for old HDDs is not much to write home about, I'd ditch them altogether and stick with your OS installed on the 60gb and have the 120gb as a storage drive until you can buy a cheap large capacity modern HDD. Now that lots more new drives have been coming out of Asia for a while the prices are more reasonable and more realistic. Then you could look into RAIDing the two to get that last 5% of performance as I first mentioned.

 

[Hellinabox]

For those who haven't looked it up: HyperDuo is SSD tiering, not just RAID.

I don't know if the card will support this but your best performance option would be to create two RAID0 sets (one of the HDDs and one of the SSDs). Then create a hyperduo configuration caching the HDD raid set to the SSD raid set. Set to Capacity mode, this translates to writeback mode. Otherwise you'll be stuck with the HDD write speed. Keep in mind that if you do choose to do RAID0, you will lose everything if one of the drives fails.

If you want speed but don't want the risk of RAID0, put both sets in RAID1 instead. This will allow for one drive failure per set and you will still see SSD speeds from the configuration.

The Marvell controller does not support anything other than RAID0/1.

Sorry for posting two years later but I figure this will help anyone looking into HyperDuo that lands here through Google.