HDD/SSD/RAID need a set up

[Brett Williams]

Hello and thank you for taking the time to read this.
I'm building a gaming computer and here are the specs real quick.
NZXT Phantom 820
Asus P8Z77-V LK ATX
I5 or I7 haven't decided yet
Kraken Water cooler x60 AIO
700W power supply
Nvidia GeForce 660 SC
Asus 23" monitor

Now here's the issue, I want to have multiple hard drives. I'm thinking a dedicated SSD for the OS, around 60gb I think. A seperate SSD for gaming, around 128. and probably 2 500 GB hard drives. Or even a 1 TB and 1 500 GB hard drive. Will my motherboard be able to fit all this? I don't know what to look for on my motherboard to tell.

Should I go for RAID instead of HDDs or the SSDs? I don't really know much about RAID but I see people recommending them. If anyone can provide more information on what I should do OR any other kind of advice on my build please feel free. Thanks again!

 

[Kursun]

Your mainboard supports 6 ports (2*6gb/s and 4*3 gb/s)
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77V_LK/#specifications
Assuming you'll want to use one port for dvd/br rom, you can use up to 5 ssds/hdds.
Be sure to connect the ssds to the 6 gb/s ports.
For boot ssd I would recommend 120 gb, not 60 gb.

Don't do raid (0) with ssds. TRIM function is not supported with ssd raid. This means the performance of your raid ssds will deteriorate over time. A single SSD is fast enough. Be sure to select AHCI mode on your bios before installing OS.

 

[j2j663]

If you are a little careful and know what you are doing 60GB is more than enough for just an OS. I ran Win7 64bit for a couple of years on a 64GB SSD and never used more than 40GB of space. As I said though, if you don't want to worry about it, or don't know where you can save the space then go with the 128GB SSD and you will have plenty of room for an OS. For games and programs I would recommend nothing less than 120GB especially if you are looking to install anything large or programs that like to make backups on their own (MS Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, ...) Space can go quickly with those programs, make sure you go through the options once the programs are installed and know where it is making backups or storing cached files.

If you didn't have an SSD I may say give RAID a try. Since you are using an SSD there is no point in using RAID as anything that you want speed from you should be putting on an SSD. Find a good 1TB HDD that you trust and throw all of your data on that. you can get 1TB HDDs for less than $70 right now.

About TRIM and AHCI ...
TRIM is starting to be supported for SSDs in RAID but not all of them, yet. On a normal desktop machine there is really no reason to RAID your SSDs. 99% of your workloads cannot create queue depths that can truly tax your SSD anyways so there is no point in trying to increase its speed.
If you are installing windows as your OS it will take care of all of the TRIM, AHCI and many other things for your SSD. There are ways to verify that those things have been setup correctly but there isn't much point unless you feel that your SSD isn't performing up to par.

 

[Brett Williams]

so what is this AHCI?
is raid just making your HDD faster?

 

[j2j663]

ACHI = Advanced Host Controller Interface, it replaced the older IDE interface. It is the way that the motherboard and low level software talk to the disk drives either HDD or SSD.

RAID is mainly used for reliability and to reduce downtime of data. There is also a RAID setup that basically reads data from 2 devices at once and so theoretically it should be roughly 2x as fast. In practice it is not 2x as fast but in the right settings it can scale pretty well.

Here if you are interested you can read the whole article but the last page (the one linked to) has the conclusion. Don't get too excited before you read the last sentence as says that even though the performance gains from SSDs RAIDs are impressive you need the right environment to take advantage of them and a home desktop is not the correct environment.

 

[j2j663]

Sorry here is the link

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-iops,2848-10.html