Ssd for OS - separate for data

[Juddinvail]

concerned about speed and back-up and data safety.
want suggestions on how to best setup HDs on new asus p8p67 m mobo w/ intel 2700k qd core 3.5 - 3.9hz.
thinking about using crucial 120mb ssd3 as OS drive and 2 separate crucial ssd drives as data drives in raid 1.

suggestions for better setup for speed and data safety would be appreciated.

 

[rolli59]

1 SSD (possibly bigger) for OS and applications and two mechanical HDD's in raid 1 is what I would do. Using SSD's as storage is simply very expensive compared to HDD's.
The SSD provides the speed and raid 1 data safety.

 

[Juddinvail]

as I work on very large flies i.e. Excel data spreadsheets, Photo Shop and Video, are the high speed HDDs as effective and efficient? What about reliability...thus the reason for RAID 1. Seems like likelihood of HHD failure is greater than SDD???No?

 

[rolli59]

Failure rate is similar to both. SSD are much faster but very expensive when you get up to 500MB or so when talking storage.

 

[Juddinvail]

The SSDs alone will not provide for the size of data I often save (cumulatively not at a time, perhaps backing up once every two to three months). Therefore I had intended to often backing up data to large capacity HDD (1tb-2tb HDD or greater) and then removing data from SSDs to make room for more.

While redundant I know, and time consuming, are 2 SDDs for data my best choice for speed and reliability even though size and cost cause me to put final data on separate HDD?

You have any suggestions to better accomplish my needs?

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Asus P8Z68-V LX
Intel® Core i7-2600 3.40 GHz 8M
60 GB Corsair Force Series SATA-III for OS
120GB Corsair Force Series SATA-III (2) for RAID

Most of WORK is large Excel and Quickbooks files. However, third party software is heavy on data used for employee scheduling/time management and interfacing with QB for invoicing.

Secondary use is for pics and artwork utilizing Adobe Photoshop CS and to a lesser extent family video work with Premiere Pro and Pinnacle Studio.

Often I have both monitors filled with multiple windows on each and multiple programs open.

 

[rolli59]

Your plan works but 120GB has to be backed up often and a lot of writing on SSD's shortens their life see this about write endurance http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

 

[Juddinvail]

As I was looking at Mobo, I notice the storage offers 6 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s), and 2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s). If I proceed with three Ssd, one for OS and two in RAID 1, then I won't have one of the three drivesn utilizing the faster sata 6gb port. As such I assume I'd put the OS drive on the SATA II (3gb) port and place the two data RAIDs on the SATA III ports.

Am I understanding this correctly? If so, are there other Mobo/chip set to consider that offer 3 or more SATA III ports?

Am I being too concerned with a nominal speed difference?

 

[r0ck3tm@n]

Juddinvail, this is what I recommend.

I recommend that you consider using one SSD for your OS, two SSD's in RAID 0 for your OS, or two SSD's in RAID 1 for your OS. Probably the most reliable would be one 256GB SSD for your OS on a 6GB/s port, it's what I'm doing. Reliability these days with SSD's isn't what you might think, they have issues, mostly with the firmware that I can see. They do fail.

Now then, this is the fun part. Get four (4) Western Digital WD RE4's and an Adaptec RAID 6405E and run those in RAID 10 for your data drives. You won't be disappointed. You will still need to make backups, of course, but those drives in RAID 10 will be fast and reliable and problem free unless of course you get a bad drive. Actually I would expect more trouble from the SSD(s) because that technology is still not mature, just read the appropriate forums.

The (hardware) RAID card will provide it's own SATA ports so you will still have plenty on your motherboard to play with. I would not replace my 4 RE4's with SSD's.

Add a hot swap SATA drive bay for backups and there you go.