Question If I upgrade from two 256gb ssds in raid 0 to one 1tb ssd, will there be a noticeable difference?

[dlee098]

Basically the thread title. I currently have two Samsung pm961 256gb ssds in raid in my laptop. It seems a little slow when booting and doing basic tasks like opening programs and such, so I'm wondering if upgrading to a newer 1tb ssd like the HP Ex920 would be noticeably faster in real world usage.

I don't transfer a ton of large files, some games here and there, but that's about it.

Current specs :

Lenovo Ideapad 720s 15ikb
I7-7700hq
16gb ram
256gbx2 ssd in raid

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[USAFRet]

Probably not a lot of "speed" difference either way.
You do lose the complexity and gain reliability, though.

 

[Math Geek]

the raid set-up basically doubles the speed of the ssd since it writes to both at the same time. so unless the 1 tb drive is twice as fast as one of the 256 drives, then you will actually be slower overall. will it be noticeable?? i'm sure you can convince yourself either way. if you obsess over it, then anything looks slow and not up to par. it will never be instant access like people tend to say it will be. remember that opening a program takes it from the ssd into the ram and then executed from there. so your raid set-up simply gets it to ram faster. once there it's now up to the rest of the system to use that data and the ssd has nothing to do with it.

if there is a huge slowdown it likely is related to the rest of the system and not the ssd anyway.

 

[USAFRet]

the raid set-up basically doubles the speed of the ssd since it writes to both at the same time. so unless the 1 tb drive is twice as fast as one of the 256 drives, then you will actually be slower overall.

Actually, no. In theory and benchmarks, possibly. That does not necessarily translate to user facing performance.

Older tests:
SATA III SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

NVMe SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

 

[dlee098]

Actually, no. In theory and benchmarks, possibly. That does not necessarily translate to user facing performance.

Older tests:
SATA III SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

NVMe SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

Thanks for the reply and for the article. I'm really not savvy to anything regarding raid, I bought my laptop used and the drives came that way so this was helpful.

So if I'm reading correctly, it should be faster to have the single drive, is that right?

 

[prophet51]

Actually, no. In theory and benchmarks, possibly. That does not necessarily translate to user facing performance.

Older tests:
SATA III SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

NVMe SSD's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

Depends on the quality of your raid card, amd raid 0 is worse than a single drive for 4k 1Q1T reads while windows software raid 0 is 10% faster than a single drive for me.

 

[popatim]

You'll notice twice the space right from the go but speeds depends on the apps. Windows loading will barely register a difference.