What's the better deal these days: 2 1TB HDD's in Raid 0 or a 400GB SSD?

[Rafael Mestdag]

I mean, to put all your games and have them load quickly, I personally find that the best deal is to use a 2 1TB HDD's Raid 0 array rather than a relatively too expesive 400GB SSD which may be a lot quicker but it's way too small if compared to the 2TB worth of space you get from the Raid 0 array using relatively inexpensive 2 1TB disks.

What's your opinion on this?

 

[mrmez]

2x 1TB drives in raid 0 = 1TB
Not 2TB.

What's better?
I prefer the speed of an SSD, and there's no way a raid HDD array can compete with a good M.2 ssd.
I also don't have that may games.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

2x 1TB drives in raid 0 = 1TB
Not 2TB.

What's better?
I prefer the speed of an SSD, and there's no way a raid HDD array can compete with a good M.2 ssd.
I also don't have that may games.

As far as I know the 2 1TB drives in Raid 0 would result in 2TB total space. I've done it with two 2TB disks and the result was 4TB, proof of it is exactly the fact that you pointed out: there's no redundancy in Raid 0, so there's double the space of the smaller disk. In this case both disks would be 1TB which equals 2TB total in Raid 0.

 

[mrmez]

I might be thinking of raid 1???

Either way, it depends on your needs. If you NEED 4TB, SSDs will be really expensive. But you can never compare the theoretical 300-400MB/s of HDDs in raid with the ~3,000Mb/s real world speeds of a single ssd.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

SSD = approx. 500megabit read/write either way

Raid 0 = having more than one HDD work together as a single hard drive with no improvement of speed still approx. 150 - 175megabit read/write either way

more information of how Raid works here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels

P.S. - Megabit not to be confused with Megabyte.
150megabit is approximately 20megabyte per second although most decent HDD's can read up to 35 - 40megabyte per second with a write speed of about 24 -30megabyte per second depending on what is being read/written.

So it's up to you. Do you want faster speeds (which believe me, once you go there you don't want to go back) or more storage? Alternatively, if you are talking about buying 2x1tb drives I would ask why? unless you are getting an insane deal on them it would be cheaper to buy a single 2tb drive.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

SSD = approx. 500megabit read/write either way

Raid 0 = having more than one HDD work together as a single hard drive with no improvement of speed still approx. 150 - 175megabit read/write either way

more information of how Raid works here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels

P.S. - Megabit not to be confused with Megabyte.
150megabit is approximately 20megabyte per second although most decent HDD's can read up to 35 - 40megabyte per second with a write speed of about 24 -30megabyte per second depending on what is being read/written.

So it's up to you. Do you want faster speeds (which believe me, once you go there you don't want to go back) or more storage? Alternatively, if you are talking about buying 2x1tb drives I would ask why? unless you are getting an insane deal on them it would be cheaper to buy a single 2tb drive.

My Raid 0 array(almost full of games) with two Seagate 7200rpm disks are giving out(according to Crystal Disk Mark) a sequencial Read/Write speed of around 200MB/s which is quite faster than the other 2TB 7200rpm Seagate drive I've got full of data, around 140MB/s. Not to mention the Raid 0 array 4K read/writes are practically triple those of the single 2TB disk.

In practical terms, my games on the Raid 0 array feel at least 50% faster to load than they were on a single 2TB 7200rpm disk, sometimes it feels like the games load twice as fast. I haven't bechmarked it yet but I've seen several game loading times benchmarks on Raid 0 arrays and all of them show more or less the same speed increase.

I'd love to get a 1TB SSD drive but it's almost 10 times more expensive than a 1TB HDD, even a small 128GB SSD is more expensive here than a 1TB HDD, so I personally don't think an SSD is worth it if you're planning on storing a whole lot of games AND still get a significant speed boost on loading times. And I don't see SSD's getting as cheap as HDD's any time soon either.

 

[Myrmidonas]

I have an SSD for all my games. When it reaches the total capacity I use Steam Mover to move the games I rarely play, on a HDD. Steam Mover creates a symbolic link at the old location SSD, so your computer thinks everything’s in the same place—but all that space-eating data really resides on another hard drive.

In the end of the day I have the games I play mostly on the SSD and the rest on an HDD. The operating system things everything is on SSD. I can move games with Steam Mover back and forth as I see it fit for my tastes. All of that without having to reinstall anything on my machine.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

I'd say loading times in games is a moot point. I use a standard 7200rpm drive and don't feel like the load times are bad. It's not instant but it's pretty quick to me. I personally only see an SSD as good for housing your OS, Main applications and as a storage space for recording RAW video like when I record my live streams or non live stream gameplay and doing video editing. My games can go on a regular HDD for all I care.

 

[failboat]

raid performance by adding disks to a 0,10,5 or similar setup increases your seq read/write at a cost to random read/write. SSD have fast seq and random. the faster spinning disks have better random r/w which is why many are used in raids that require better random access time. different game types will load differently. something like skyrim or wow is going to be reading off disk as you move around the map. a small closed map like in fps you might get the whole map in ram. gpu ram size and/or render speed can be the culprit too if it's not big enough to store files that need to be rendered, 1G is too little these days. if you feel shutters, like when you walk into a new section of a map and it stops for a sec or so, then a ssd might be better. raid 0 will make that worse.

one funny example is in the game rust our group used to camp at render points for large bases. people would walk in and stop for 1 sec if their pc was too slow and it was gg for them.