best RAID setup for 3 SSDs

[leeb2013]

hi,

I have 3 SSDs - 2 x 250GB and 1x 128GB. I would like to experiment with a RAID setup, specifically RAID 0 using the 2 x 250GB SSDs. Please can you tell me if there is any other RAID level which would provide any useful data protection using the third 128GB SSD? I've seen there are various other RAID levels using a third SSD for parity checks etc, but I'm not sure how useful these are in protecting against SSD errors or total failure of a SSD.

Note that I won't be storing anything critical on the SSDs as anything important is on my NAS, but it would be useful to have some level of data protection/recovery for the O/S and games which are on the SSDs, mainly for convenience.

Also, am I correct in thinking that Windows 8 now supports TRIM on RAID'd SSDs?

Thanks

 

[kanewolf]

Theoretically you could do a 3 volume RAID 5 with only using 128 GB on two of the disks.

 

[Gary Carden]

You've lost me, since you already have a raid 1 setup and will have a perfect copy of your HD/SSD, why do you want to copy that again? One drive failing is a possibility to anybody, but your copy failing is `almost` zero. THEN you want a 3rd copy...

either get all 3 drives and JBOD then together or just simply copy your files over folder to folder style.

oh, you could always join all three together as a raid 5/10? and have the 3rd drive as your redundant drive. you would be limitied to a 256GB setup though as the drives do not match, therefore smallest drive gets mirrored

 

[leeb2013]

doh, sorry for the confusion, I should have typed RAID 0 - updated OP.

 

[4745454b]

What are you doing that needs that kind of read/write speeds? Doing it just because you can isn't really a good reason. If you have the time and desire you can setup an AID0 or RAID 5 array like suggested above so that you got the learning experience. But I wouldn't bother RAIDing SSDs. They are fast enough unless you are doing something really odd. (Your games are backed up on Steam/origin, and you should still have your OS disk laying around. So the important things are already backed up.)

 

[leeb2013]

unfortunately having an inquisitive mind means I do lots of things without good reason, other than to learn from it (even if that means learning not to bother the next time!).

It sounds like RAID 5 would give me some fault tolerance, but I can't find anywhere weather it should be an equal sized drive to the other two.

For RAID 0, I found this piece of info;

◦Best performance is achieved when data is striped across multiple controllers with only one drive per controller

here;

http://www.acnc.com/raidedu/0

My mobo - Asrock Z77 Extreme4-m has two SATA 3 controllers; the Intel Z77 controller and a ASMedia ASM1061 controller. (I found the Intel controller to be faster). Does the statement above mean in RAID 0 I should use each disk on different controllers?

 

[4745454b]

Fair enough. Just realize that by using raid you might be adding another layer of risk to your data. The RAID built into motherboard isn't nearly as good as the dedicated cards. And if something happens to your driver, you get to spend time rebuilding the array. (Unless you picked AID0, then it's gone.)

You should always use identical drives. You don't have to, but you'll be better off doing so. As mentioned above you can use the first 128GBs on the 256GB drives and make a 3x128GB array. Some controllers will even let you use the other 2x128GB for data.

To my knowledge you can't use multiple controllers. It's a single controller that does everything. You can't plug in a drive on each of yours and RAID across them. I have no clue why they wrote that.

 

[leeb2013]

ok, that's great thanks