Does adding more SSD's in RAID 0 improve performance?

[Zii]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233623

I'm planning on buying 4 of these. And I was wondering if I'll have better performance if I add more SSD's. I can afford to buy 6. Should I buy 6, or will my speed not have any improvement over 4? I heard someone say that your read/write won't increase if you add more than 2 SSD's in raid0. And yes, I will be raid0'ing these. (I thought about raid5, but I don't really understand it too well)

I know I know. I have plenty of storage to back this all up.

 

[USAFRet]

SSD in RAID 0 does not have any performance increase over one, much less 4 or 6.

Read this before you go down that road:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

 

[USAFRet]

In some very special edge use cases, maybe. Regular use? Not even a little bit.

 

[LostAlone]

In theory you might be able to get better performance, but in practice you will quite simply be wasting your money. The benefits of 2 SSDs in RAID0 is are nebulous, 4 is stupid.

What do you need faster storage for anyway?

 

[oczdude8]

Buy 2 nice 256gb 850 pros and raid 0 them. They will be blazing fast, AND MUCH MUCH MUCH more reliable then that refurbished junk.

 

[USAFRet]

Buy 2 nice 256gb 850 pros and raid 0 them. They will be blazing fast, AND MUCH MUCH MUCH more reliable then that refurbished junk.

Do you have any documentation on that 'blazing fast'?
Some use case for real people?

 

[atomicWAR]

the only way you would use that speed/bandwidth is if you had two SSD raid's on the same system and were transferring large sequential files from one SSD raid to the other SSD raid. Say if you transfer a file from the SSD raid to a mechanical HDD the HDD would't keep up and the SSD raid would keep having to wait for it to catch up. Now you might get some slightly faster boot times in big games or opening large files but that's about it. SSD raid 0 past 2 drives for OS drive is overkill. your better off adding some redundancy or just sticking to two larger SSD drives in raid 0 and calling it a day

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

A problem arises when you RAID your SSDs. They are already fast enough to saturate most interfaces. The SATA interface is not coping well with high end SSD throughput, and adding a second, well, isn't going to gain you much. About the only place I would expect a significant improvement would be when you are specifically reading non-compressible data, as non-compressible tends to move at speeds well below the saturation point, or when writing, as writes to SSDs are rarely accomplished at full speed. Since the RAID 0 would only be writing half the data to each drive, you may see an improvement, but you still may not, depending on whether the smaller writes still require a minimum amount of time to be performed, that a full sized write would also require.

If you find yourself wanting for more speed than regular SSDs are offering you, look into NVMe. Higher performance systems are running the data over the PCIe interface rather than taking on the overhead of communicating through SATA. There are some major performance improvements, but they aren't cheap. I think you'll be able to sort out whether one of these solutions will fit into your budget, or if an SSD is enough for now.

 

[Zii]

In theory you might be able to get better performance, but in practice you will quite simply be wasting your money. The benefits of 2 SSDs in RAID0 is are nebulous, 4 is stupid.

What do you need faster storage for anyway?

I don't need it for the speed necessarily, but I'll need the storage. I'm a gamer, and I also do lot's of HD video rendering. So I work with gigantic files on a regular basis.

 

[Zii]

SSD in RAID 0 does not have any performance increase over one, much less 4 or 6.

Read this before you go down that road:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

The reason I'm asking, is because I came across this video here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8

And they claim to get over 2Gb per second. I thought that maybe adding more, would increase read/write speeds with EACH additional drive added. But I've also heard that adding too many SLOWS your system down. That's why I'm so confused.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Well, the practical side of RAID 0 is the increased vulnerability / volatility of the drive array. You're not gaining speed, so at most, you would be gaining space, which would be better gained by buying a bigger storage device than by combining two smaller ones in such a fashion.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

You are fooling yourself if you think you can achieve more than the saturation point of a SATA port. The drives may be able to cue up unlimited amounts of data, but if your interface doesn't allow you to get at it faster than 6 Gb/s, what good is all that data being ready?

 

[USAFRet]

In theory you might be able to get better performance, but in practice you will quite simply be wasting your money. The benefits of 2 SSDs in RAID0 is are nebulous, 4 is stupid.

What do you need faster storage for anyway?

I don't need it for the speed necessarily, but I'll need the storage. I'm a gamer, and I also do lot's of HD video rendering. So I work with gigantic files on a regular basis.

2 x 250GB SSD in RAID 0 = 500GB space
2 x 250GB SSD as individual drives = 500GB space.

Benefit? A single drive letter. Easily fixed otherwise.
Drawback? RAID 0.

Multiple SSD's in one system is no problem. My main system has 3.
1 x 120GB for OS and applications
1 x 250GB SSD for photo and video work
1 x 250GB SSD for other working files

Same performance, no RAID needed.

 

[LostAlone]

In theory you might be able to get better performance, but in practice you will quite simply be wasting your money. The benefits of 2 SSDs in RAID0 is are nebulous, 4 is stupid.

What do you need faster storage for anyway?

I don't need it for the speed necessarily, but I'll need the storage. I'm a gamer, and I also do lot's of HD video rendering. So I work with gigantic files on a regular basis.

Hard drive speed is NOT the limiting factor when it comes to rendering video, or even handling video files at all. While you are editing your project is being handled in RAM, when you are rendering there isn't a system that exists that can encode any kind of video fast enough to saturate even a mechanical hard drive. Not even the genuinely gigantic files that get spat out by high end production cameras (red rocket etc) won't bottleneck while spitting it out in real time.

RAID comes with some extremely genuine downsides, and in this case absolutely no upsides. Just don't do this. It's a huge cost to go to basically just for epeen.