Question about SSD Raid 0

Anthony_195

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Mar 29, 2017
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I just bought a 500 gb mx500 crucial ssd with about 465 available gb. I already used about 301 gb and only have 163 gb available . I’m thinking about buying another one now. My qestion is what happens when an SSD fails in raid 0 ? Will I have to redownload everything in the failing drive? Doesn’t the ssd only have so many write cycles ? This could then be a problem right? I’m mostly gaming with the exception of Microsoft word. Also how much space should I leave free on my current drive until I get more space . Have 163 go available.I still have my old HD but I’m afraid it could have a virus even if I reformat it. Are two 500gb SSDs in raid 0 faster then one 1tb drive by itself?
 
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Do not use RAID0 with SSD's. The performance gain is very small, and the risk of losing EVERYTHING if one unit fails is big.

You CAN use your old HDD safely if you do something a bit more complicated (but not much). I agree that a simple Format MIGHT not eliminate certain types of malware. But a ZERO FILL will. A Zero Fill writes all zeroes to EVERY Sector of the HDD, even the first parts where Partition tables etc. are located. When it is done, the HDD is just like a totally empty brand new drive. As a side bonus, doing this triggers a semi-hidden diagnostic system built into the drive that Windows does not even know about which will detect any weak Sectors and replace them with known-good ones so that Windows finds a HDD with NO Bad...

TJ Hooker

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Yes, if one drive fails in RAID 0 all the data on both drives will be lost.

You don't need to worry about write cycles, endurance isn't really a concern for consumer usage.

Putting SSDs in RAID 0 is largely pointless from a performance perspective (may even slightly hurt random I/O). Unless you really want both drives to appear as a single 1TB volume, I'd recommend against RAIDing them.
 

Zerk2012

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Buy anouther SSD no need to redo everything for Raid0 their no real performance gain. Reformat your hard drive and any virus would be gone.
 
IF a drive fails in raid 0 you better have a backup to restore anything. Raid support isn't great for consumer SSD. It's also not going to increase performance much. seq goes up and random goes down. ssd seq is already very fast. I wouldn't recommend taking a random hit to increase it.
 

Paperdoc

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Do not use RAID0 with SSD's. The performance gain is very small, and the risk of losing EVERYTHING if one unit fails is big.

You CAN use your old HDD safely if you do something a bit more complicated (but not much). I agree that a simple Format MIGHT not eliminate certain types of malware. But a ZERO FILL will. A Zero Fill writes all zeroes to EVERY Sector of the HDD, even the first parts where Partition tables etc. are located. When it is done, the HDD is just like a totally empty brand new drive. As a side bonus, doing this triggers a semi-hidden diagnostic system built into the drive that Windows does not even know about which will detect any weak Sectors and replace them with known-good ones so that Windows finds a HDD with NO Bad Sectors. There is one exception to that last statement. Any new HDD has a stock of known-good spare Sectors to use for that "self-fixing" replacement operation, and some of those might have been used up in normal operations before this. IF a lot of replacements are done, the HDD's SMART system will alert you to this and warn that the HDD might fail soon. If that happens, your best choice is to replace the HDD. So, after you do the Zero Fill you check that this is NOT a problem yet before putting the drive into use.

How to do this? You could download from the web a utility called DBAN and use that. It has lots of tools, including a Zero Fill one. You have not told us what company made your old HDD. Some of them have free disk utility tools for their drives only that you can download. For example, if you have a WD drive, get their Data Lifegard utility. If you have a Seagate unit, get their SeaTools. Each of these has several diagnostic tools to check your disk for problems, as well as the Zero Fill utility.

WARNING! Doing a ZERO FILL will destroy ALL of the data on the disk, so be SURE it has nothing you want to keep. ALSO be VERY SURE you tell it to work on your old HDD, and nothing else. I am in the habit of disconnecting most other drives when I do this, just so I can't get it wrong.

Running a Zero Fill takes a long time because it has to access EVERY Sector of the drive, so be patient. When it is done, back out of the utility. Now is a good time to use the testing tools in the utility package to verify the cleaned HDD has no problems.

If everything looks good, reboot your machine. Now in Windows go to Disk Management and find the HDD in the LOWER RIGHT panel. That place shows you hardware devices even if Windows cannot use them yet. RIGHT-click on the empty HDD and choose to Create a New Simple Volume. Check the options - most will be good. But you do NOT need this to be a bootable drive, since it will only be used for data. AND you can do a Quick Format (not a Full Format) because you have just completed the extra time-consuming testing that a Full Format does.

Once you have that old HDD cleaned up, tested, and Partitioned/Formatted ready for use, you will want to re-adjust where things go. Windows has created folders on your C: drive (the SSD) which are default places for many types of files. Similarly, many of your application software packages will have created folders on the C: drive for the files they create, like Word documents or graphical drawings, etc. You can tell Windows and your software apps to change to new folders on the HDD instead, then copy all you old user files in the folders on C: to the new folders on the HDD. Once they are all copied over, you can delete the old C: data folders and their contents, freeing up space there. And from now on, most new files created will go the the HDD (whatever drive letter that is), not to the SSD called C:.
 
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