Fastest SSD set up? (2 SSD in Raid 0 ? )

[Mfusick]

Hi guys,

I have a Vertex2 120GB now... SSD.

Had it for a while... I was early adopter. Love it.

Looking to build a new PC, either LGA2011 or 1155.

Wondering if it's worth it to upgrade my SSD???

Or perhaps - is there a alternative set up method that would yield faster results.

My current SSD will remain in my PC, and become a HTCP. I am starting fresh.

My budget is about $1000 US for Drives. I also have NAS and many exisiting HHD's.

What's the best performance possible in my range ? Does SSD even work with Raid ?

 

[chesteracorgi]

SSDs can be placed in a RAID configuration: RAID is dependent on the controller and the OS. However, the performance gains for RAIDed SSDs is marginal, at best.

RAID improves HDD performance because you have two spinning medium(s) and their read speed is increased by interleaving their reads. The actual speed of a HDD is considerably less than the data transfer limit of the interface (be it SATA, PATA, SCSI or PCI). With prefetch instructions the RAID controller can predict and seek out the next data request while completing the current seek.

With SSDs the fetch command is not limited by a spinning medium. The (internal) speed of SSDs approaches the data transfer saturation point of SATA 3, and saturates SATA 2.

RAIDing a SATA 2 SSD should not produce any performance improvement as SSDs limited to SATA 2 bandwidth cannot put out more than the bottleneck of SATA 2. SATA 3 SSDs may see marginal performance improvements by RAID, but this is limited to the smaller SSDs and underperforming SSDs.

RAIDing SSDs also has a down side from the perspective of reliability and redundancy. SSD quality control has improved, but I'd match HDD reliability against SSD reliability any day. If you do a RAID 0 of SSDs you risk your data if either fails. Backup is an absolute requirement, unless you want to risk catastrophic data loss.

It is wothwhile to upgrade your SSD to a larger (hopefully 256GB+) faster model. But the risk vs. reward of SSDs in RAID is not worth the candle.

 

[Mfusick]

Best answer selected by mfusick.

 

[Mfusick]

Thanks man!

how come the larger drives are faster for SSD?

 

[chesteracorgi]

They are faster because of the oprimization of the read controller. Why? I don't exactly know.

 

[Mfusick]

so my next build... bottom line is I should look for a 240gig Vertex3 MAX if I want to upgrade from my 120GB vertex2 now?

Forget about RAID since it won't help my SSD speeds.

Any other SSD drives out there that are very fast?

 

[Badelhas]

so my next build... bottom line is I should look for a 240gig Vertex3 MAX if I want to upgrade from my 120GB vertex2 now?

Forget about RAID since it won't help my SSD speeds.

Any other SSD drives out there that are very fast?

I am also with that question, I have a Vertex 1 60Gb and I´ve been thinking if it´s worth upgrading to a Vertex 3 120Gb connected to my Z69 Sata 3 port. Will I seen some real world performance gains or only in benchmarks?
Cheers.

Andre

 

[Mfusick]

I am also with that question, I have a Vertex 1 60Gb and I´ve been thinking if it´s worth upgrading to a Vertex 3 120Gb connected to my Z69 Sata 3 port. Will I seen some real world performance gains or only in benchmarks?
Cheers.

Andre

There was a good article in maximum pc where they did SSD raid 0 and got 1000 MB/sec.

 

[ChaddM]

The statement above that SSD's do not gain significant performance in RAID is incorrect. The performance gain in most areas is similar to HDDs.

My co-worker is running a pair of Micron M4 64GB drives in Raid 0, and gets around 1GB/s sequential read performance, which is nearly double the performance of the drives running stand alone. Write performance is almost 500MB/s, again about double.

4 SSD raid arrays also show significant performance gains in some areas, but less in others.

Here is an example: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...20-240gb-ssd-raid-0-performance-review-5.html



So if you are going to drop $1000 on storage, I would recommend two or three 128GB SSD drives in raid 0, with HDDs for data backup.

Raid 0 will give you a ton of speed but increase failure probability, so you will want to keep full backups.