Is it best to RAID 0 the same SSD rather than using separate?

[bingaloman]

I have 2 Kingston 120GB SSD and those are the only drives my PC is going to be using.

Is it best to just put them both in RAID 0 to combine as one drive?

And from what I understand, RAID puts 2 drives and combines storage and creates it as basically one drive right? So if I am right on that does that mean it will make just one drive such as C drive instead of making C and D?

I have never done this before.


Thanks for any help!

 

[ahnilated]

Raid 0 makes the 2 drives one but you also double the chance of failure. The nice part is you get close to double the throughput speed. It would make you have one C drive.

 

[ss202sl]

It's really better to not use raid. You won't see any real benefit.

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

 

[bingaloman]

Raid 0 makes the 2 drives one but you also double the chance of failure. The nice part is you get close to double the throughput speed. It would make you have one C drive.

The reason I ask is because I don't want to have to manage what download goes in which drive as having one letter drive makes it alot easier.

But you say it doubles the chance of failure, why is that?

 

[ahnilated]

Because if one drive fails in a raid 0 both drives fail. You need to have good backups so you don't lose everything on both drives if one fails. The only thing you will really notice is load times for games or projects you are working on with Raid 0. My setup gets about 1.0GB/sec rates with the 2 SSD's in a raid 0 and other than 1 second load times in Skyrim I really don't notice much difference.

 

[ss202sl]

Read my previous link. You won't see much of a speed increase on SSD's in raid.

It increases the risk of losing data because if either drive fails, you lose the data on both drives. 2 drives double the chance of either drive failing at any time.

 

[bingaloman]

So you guys are saying that, if one drive fails... it will carry along the other drive and make both drives fail and I'd have to get new drives again?

 

[ahnilated]

No, the data is striped across both drives. So if one drive fails it loses 50% of the stripe and you have no data. The second drive would still be healthy but would have to be reformatted with the replacement SSD.

 

[giantbucket]

install OS on the first drive
remap the various MyDocs / MyPics / Downloads folders to the other drive

done.

 

[bingaloman]

No, the data is striped across both drives. So if one drive fails it loses 50% of the stripe and you have no data. The second drive would still be healthy but would have to be reformatted with the replacement SSD.

Ah ok I see that makes sense.


Thanks for everyone's help, I guess I will just put em as separate drives then.