Vertex 3 SSD RAID 0 or RAID 1?

[Sheepe]

I recently acquired my second 120gb Vertex 3. I have a bad fetish for storage tech, so it was an impulse buy. Now I'm looking to put it to the best use. Whether that's through a RAID 0 or RAID 1 setup, I'm not certain. The biggest thing for me is improving my read speed for my boot times, then improving the start times of other programs.

I currently have my programs and documents set up on an HDD, with the exception of programs I want opened fast and those didn't give me a choice. I've also moved the Page File and most caching locations to an HDD as well. I've also split the SSD in two for my Win 7 and Ubuntu distros, 60gb for each (<40gb used by Win 7+programs and <15gb used by Ubuntu).

My conundrum is now that I have the two drive, I don't know what to do with them! My options as I see it:

Option 1): RAID 1 the two drives together and carry on with my current setup, maybe smooshing the partitions around to use space a bit better

Option 2): RAID 0 the drives to create a 240gb beast. Proceed to expand the Win 7 Part to 200gb and use the extra space to put games in, going wild with HardLinks to folders on my HDD for the save files, mods and other super malleable files.

Comp Stats:
Mobo: Crosshair IV Formula
CPU : AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2ghz
RAM : 16GB at 1600mhz
SSDs : 2x 120gb Vertex 3
HDDs: 3TB+2TB internal and 2x1TB external

Addendum: Do I really need to be so concerned about how many and how frequent writes are to my SSD? This seems like reasonable paranoia, but is it really?

 

[RealBeast]

Write as much as you can to your SSD, you won't wear it out. I have one as a scratch drive that I use to rip my blurays and it gets a hundred gigs a day of writes. After many months it still shows no wear in the tests, I'll very likely replace it with something bigger long before it wears out.

Personally, I would not RAID the extra drive, at least until Intel RST 11.5 is finalized to support TRIM for RAID 0 (and I understand that is a debate point). I would use it as a program and data drive and leave the OS drive alone. You will not see any real performance difference other than in benchmarks, which are useless except for ego stroking.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

^ I agree.

RAID = No TRIM and no real difference in anything but benchmarks.

 

[RetiredChief]

Concur, I have 3 systems with daul SSDs, all set up as SSD0 = OS + Program drive, and SSD1 as a "work/scratch" disk.

I use to be a BIG fan of Raid0, BEFORE SSDs.
Raid0 primarily speeds up SEquencial performance while doing nothing for access time and very little for the more important 4 K random read/writes.
Sequencial is the least important parameter for an OS + Program drive. Sequencial Only becomes important when doing a lot of work involving LARGE files structures which are Normally Sequencial in nature. For OS + program over Half of the files are under 32 K (a Good % are under 8K) and spread all over the disk - Hense It's the Ramdom 4 K that is important.

As Others have stated, You lose trim, CG has Improved with the Newer SSDs, But CG still works better with trim.