Speed is the most important

AndreL

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May 22, 2004
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18,510
One high price SSD drive thats
read 230 MB/s
write 135MB/s

or

2-3 striped ssd that are

Read: 150MB/s
Write: 90MB/s

I'll be using this setup for my Boot drive windows7
and I'll be seting it up in the raid in my bios.

So which setup will be faster.
 
I don't know about speeds necessarily, but I would probably go with the faster single drive, being it will be more upgrade-ready when you want to get more space in the future.
 
How much faster would 3 SSDrives over one SSDrive.
Would it be a dramatic imporvement or would it be just a few millisec. faster.

Also what other improvemets will com with it if any.
 
Having multiple SSD's in raid will improve sequential reads/writes, not random reads and writes if I am correct, please correct me if i am wrong somebody. For the OS, random small reads/writes are the most important and multiple SSD's will not improve in that aspect so therefore more SSD's will not be beneficial for you if utilized as just a primiary boot storage device. Moreover, if you raid SSD's that eliminates you from Trim support if the drive/manufacture supports it for a while which i'd say is a very important thing to have.

When you ask which setup will be faster, sequentials don't say anything, i need specs on the access times and random small read/writes to tell which is faster.
 


so if it improves the transfer rate that logicly means it is faster though the transfer rate. (more data is delivered)
So instead of haveing one SSD above I would have to get 5-8 possibly 10-15 to notice a difference in speed.

But let me give you a senerio tell me if I'm way off or not.
I get 3 of these thing
3 x 230 - read =750
3 x 135 - write = 405

So were talking
750nb/ sec vs 230mb/sec read
405mb/ sec vs 135mb /sec write

and you saying that, that won't show a difference in load times of Win7
 
The problem is that when you boot Win7 you're not loading a few really big files, you're actually loading hundreds or thousands of really small files. When you load a 4KByte file, the transfer time of the file is pretty much negligible compared to the time required to just to find the d@mn thing.

This means that the bulk transfer rate isn't nearly as important as the access time for booting windows and starting applications. You might see a 10 or 20% decrease in times with RAID, but that's probably about it. Compared to the huge difference that an SSD makes over a mechanical hard drive, it's really not worth fussing over, IMHO.
 
If windows 7 was one gaint made of huge 100mb files or something, then hard drives would boot it in a matter of seconds, but for some reason booting win7 take over a minute for hard drives even when thier transfer rate is huge.
Look at my reasoning:
-Windows 7 64-BIt takes up around 800-900mb on idle if you have a fresh install.
-Lets say you take a hard drive like a WD Caviar Black 1TB which is relativly fast and lets just say it has a 100Mbps transfer of its sequentials. This means that windows 7 should boot in 8-9 seconds since 800/100 is 8seconds. However that drive is gonna take 1minute+ to boot, why?...your answer is access times, hard drives have huge access times like 10-15ms. transfering the file itself into memory is instant but finding the file is where the gold is. Thats where SSD's come in, it doesn't matter of your huge sequentials becuase the files loaded by windows are usually a couple KB in size, but since acess times are practically 0 on the SSD, it finds all the thousands of files that windows loads very fast and therefore takes around 10 seconds to load windows 7. I have an intel x-25m and it has a 270mbps transfer on average, if this was the case windows 7 would take a little over 2 seconds load but it takes 7-10 because even an SSD has some access time but still lower then an HDD. Raid only improves sequentials which is usefull for transfering large files with many GB's of data. I hope it gives you better picture.