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SSD Raid 0 - Is it a good idea?


fenix

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I've done some research and I simply cannot decide. I currently have a Samsung 840 Evo SSD (250GB) and I can't figure out if it would be worth it to use it in RAID 0. From what I've read online, RAID 0 with SSD's can impede random read/write speed and access speeds, but I can't be completely sure. TRIM shouldn't be a problem since I'll be using a X79 mobo. I pretty much have 3 options that I am looking at. (I have three bays total, one already being in use)

1) Set up RAID 0 with my OS drive, and leave the 3rd bay for a larger storage device later.

2) Leave my OS drive alone, but use the other two bays to setup a RAID 0 array for my largest files/games and storage

3) Do not use RAID 0 with any of my drives

Performance in loading games, pictures, videos, applications like photoshop etc are my main concern. The cost is not a huge issue, nor is the lack of security (I back up my most important files, while the rest are all replaceable). I'm definitely going to get more SSD's in the future, and I don't want to miss out on a free performance boost if it's available, but I also don't want to waste my time/money setting up a RAID 0 array if it's not even that good with these drives.

I'm hoping someone who knows a lot about this subject can help me out. I understand that the differences in real world performance may not be that substantial, but super high-capacity storage isn't hugely important to me, so I have no problems paying for another 250GB Evo to set up RAID even if it isn't as cost efficient as saving up for a larger drive. I'm going crazy trying to figure this out... :06:

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Hi there!

I am using a RAID 0 ssd setup in my own rig, just to get a few things out of the way:

1) RAID 0 scales almost liniar with ssd's, als long your motherboard and CPU can keep up, you'll almost double your performance.

2) SSD's are rock solid, even after using my 2*120 GB Corsair Force GT drives alot daily, it's still 100% functional.

3) Even though the performance goes through the roof with a raid 0 setup... You won't really mention the diffrence.

Unless you're going to benchmark to see how fast your RAID 0 really is, it feels exactly the same as 1 SSD.

The best option is to have 1 big SSD and have your main OS installed on it, so that be BIOS can be on AHCI instead of RAID. That way you'll keep the TRIM enabled and, needless to say, that way you will not lose performance over time.

My advice: If you really want just a tad faster loading speeds with big files, shoot for RAID 0, otherwise you could keep yourself away from the hassle of RAID and al the driver issues that may go with them.

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As Khatarian said, going RAID 0 with SSD's isn't going to be too different for what you intend to do. You probably won't see that much of a difference from RAID 0 compared to a single SSD in real time. Another good point Khatarian said is the headaches with RAID sometimes.

I'd say use one SSD for your OS, and the other SSD for any frequently accessed apps/games. That way, in the event one of your SSD's blow up, your RAID won't completely be demolished and you'll either lose your OS, or a few games/apps.

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  • 2 months later...

I have two Plextor M3S with 512GB capacity in RAID0 (MSI GT683DXR with modified UEFI for TRIM support) and I don't see a big increase of speed.

So I think the best option is third variant - without RAID0 your data on second disk won't be lost if first disk will be crashed.

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From my experience RAID0 is better than the single drive when I put two 840's in a raid I noticed faster boot, game load times, and file xfers. It may not be a huge speed difference like from HDD to SSD but you will notice it and like it; especially if you have to copy or extract large files often.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Stick to AHCI and NO RAId. I tried RAID on my two 1 TB Samsung 840 EVOs, yeah good benchmarks, but usage wise, you will not notice on bit of a difference, only the added hassle in updating firmware and managing your drive:

[h=1]Samsung 840 Evo 1TB RAID vs. RAPID Benchmarks[/h]

So here are benchmarks of my two 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO SSDs, both in RAID 0 and in RAPID. The 4K speeds are horrible in RAID 0

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.9.0.1001 in RAID 0 (W8.1)

zui4xu.jpg

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 in RAID 0 (W8.1)

1zzrfiq.jpg

Not very happy to be honest. those 4K speeds are horrible

Previous benchmarks with RAPID, 4K is way better:

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.9.0.1001 (W8.1):

28lqc0p.jpg

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 (W8.1)

24nibdx.jpg

==========================================

Windows 7 Benchmarks:

AS SSD Benchmark with Intel Chipset Drivers 9.4.0.1027 (W7) [RAPID]

21j3k9e.png

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST 12.0.7.1002 (W7) [RAPID]

el5zyp.jpg

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i have two samsung evo 850 256GB as software raid(my mainboard doesn't support hardware raid) in my tower pc. The benchmarks are doubled, but software raid ssd's doens't boot faster because the raid beginns working after the boot.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is generally the end result. RAID 0 makes very little sense for every day desktop performance. Most people would not notice the difference. Unless you are doing a lot of sequential data writing really fast (video editing, etc) - I would argue it is a waste of money. Putting the funds towards a higher tier video card or a better monitor makes more sense imho.

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  • 1 month later...
This is generally the end result. RAID 0 makes very little sense for every day desktop performance.

Yep, I have to agree. I was seriously considering RAID 0 with 2 x 256gb SSDs but in the end I went for the Crucial MX100 512gb and I don't regret the decision. Got my entire steam library running off it and it's sweet as a nut. Might get some MSATA 2x256gb in the future to supplement my storage and then I will revisit my decision but since budget was limited I went for (what I think was) the sensible decision.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Like many have already said here - using RAID is a major pain. One thing you may want to consider is using Software RAID (please, don't throw anything at me!) instead. I have a Sager NP 8258 and have two 840 EVOs and two 840 mSATAs, all 1TB, and have used both the striped dynamic disk and Storage Spaces to create a software RAID 0 without any problems. I noticed increased read and write speeds and as far as I was able to tell via the command prompt TRIM was still enabled. Ironically enough when combining the SSDs through Samsung Magician the program actually recognized the drives as if they were in a true Hardware (i.e. BIOS) RAID configuration.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've got laptops with SSDs in raid 0 and stand alone and love both but I honestly don't see much difference between the two in daily use. One thing I'd check is if your motherboard supports trim etc Mine doesn't so periodically I have to turn off raid optimise the drivers and then enable raid again which is a pain, but worth it in the long run. If I was setting up my raid machine again I'd still go for two SSDs but run them both individually. Have the OS , temp files etc on one drive and install games/apps in the other which should still give a slight performance increase over a single SSD.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Given your two options and your concerns I would recommend dropping two regular hard drives into the other two slots and running them in RAID 0. Just make sure you get good quality drives. A little background on my setup. I have 3X2TB drives in RAID 0 and 2X120gb SSD's in RAID 0. What I can tell you is that you won't see a major improvement on the SSD's in 0. However running two large drives for your big storage needs like games and movies you will see a pretty nice performance jump.

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For most applications, there won't be any difference, but if you plan on using very storage heavy applications like Premiere, Vegas, etc, that sort of stuff, and if your project is big enough, it'll sure help. Not by a lot, but with a big enough project, there will be a notable difference :)

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supposedly unless you're doing heavy video / photo editing or using something with a lot of layers in photoshop you won't notice any difference, as you said it is something mostly for benchmarking. I saw a video on youtube though that a guy hooked up something like 28 ssd drives in raid and got crazy amount of speeds, was kinda cool seeing a 10 gig file transferring in a couple seconds though.

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I setup 3 2.5" ssd in raid 0 and have a similar sized msata ssd which is not in the raid array. I noticed using raid 0 on 2 ssd the 4k random suffers a lot but with 3 ssd and write back cache flush disabled and intel cache set to write back performance mode paired with a 16kb block size for the raid array it defaulted to compared to my msata ssd the 4k performance is doing far better than I expectes and as expected sequential reads and writes were within reason close to 3x the speed of one of the ssd. the reads closer to 3x the writes closer to 2 - 2.5x. Eventually the sata controller reaches its limits after adding a certain amount of ssd in raid 0 by not gaining anymore transfer speeds on reads or writes where it meets the controllers limits. As mentioned above the heavier apps that require larger files manipulated/saved/recorded etc will improve in performance most especially sequential reads such as loading files and to an extent the writes experience the same boost but not as much. if you have 3 ssd you can raid 2 and use the 3rd where random reads and writes of 4k are very important. Then have large storage like platter based drives on slower performing ports such as a external drive setup. A cool thing about Raid is it makes it all one drive instead of all the ssd as seperate different drives and partitions. Single drives not in raid wear less because only the drive with the data is being accessed and on Raid 0 all drives in the array share all the data and are accessed at the same time in parallel. It has benefits and it has downfalls. It is similar to the usage of multi core cpus vs single core in the performance aspect as the drives are accessing the total amount of data at the same time vs one drive to load or save a file. It comes down to ones needs and preferences in the end especially with Trim being capable on newer raid arrays.

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Its a performance boost but there are a few things to take in consideration

Raid 0 needs to have 2 or more Identical drives as in speed and storage

ex:

1) 2 ssds one is 120gb and the other is 240gb in this case when you raid 0 you'll have only 120gb of storage because the data is striped across both drives and you can make a big drive smaller in space but cant make a small drive bigger

2) 2 ssds one is faster than the other. youll only have the speed of the slower one (heres an real life example: you have a Camry and a corvette zr1 both stock: the corvette and Camry can both go 20 mph (32 KM/h) but only the corvette can go 200 MPH (321 KM/h)

so what I'm trying to say is the fast drive can go slow but the slow drive cant go faster so you basically have a ssd bottleneck.

3) if you have very important documents and they cant get lost or damaged i would not recommend doing this. because the data is striped across both drives if one drive fails you loose everything regaurless on how many drives you have.

but even if you still have those documents and still want to do this i would highly suggest getting an external.

4) Wear and Tear. if you do this like you said just make it a boot drive and have a normal HDD as the drive you write from and install things too. for one an ssd you can read from all day and it will keep superb read speed but the writing after a wheile really puts a tool on a ssd. the write speed will slow down as the read speed will stay the same thats until TRIM. BUT hold on there trim works for one or more ssds not in an array. thats were Rapid storage technology also (ex you have intel ssds you get intel ssd toolbox) to help with the trim command to both devices in the array.

5) you might not see a performance increase because if you dont have a RAID Card then your cpu has to work hard to compensate for writing to both drives thats why you need one but nothing to expensive because your not doing extreme raid 10 or 5 with a bunch of drives for data storage. so depending if you have a raid card or intel matrix ( o would google your machine to see if ou have this ) then maybe not the best idea to do raid 0 but still put in a ssd theyll always be faster than even an ssd beats the 10000 rpm velociraptor hdd.

hope this helped

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wow much agreed those are all valid points :) I used 2 samsung pm851 and a OCZ vertex 3 max iops. It runs decently even using different type drives and different storage controllers of each. The samsung are 256gb and the OCZ 240gb so i get 3x240gb in the raid array like you mention the gb over 240gb are unused on both the samsung drives in this array.

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Before my actual ROG RAIDR Express I succesfully build a RAID0 with two SAMSUNG 830 256 gb on a Intel RAID controller. I didn't have any issues and the boost was noticeable, compared with a single disk.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I use 2x120GB Intel 520 Drives in Raid0. I am still running on a z68 platform that doesn't normally support TRIM commands. However, a guy hacked in the Support into my motherboard BIOS and now it works great. I can prove the trim function works by opening an image file in HEX editor and finding a string of characters. You then open your SSD in Hex and search for the hex string and look what the location in bits is. Delete the image file. Wait a bit. Browse the SSD in hex again back to the original file location. All the bits in that area will be 00.

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im using 4 ssd drive in my Alienware 18 in Raid 0 and it works wonderfully. They are Samsung PM851 256gb (two) an OCZ vertex 3 max iops 240gb and a Lite On 80gb msata ssd. Its only a 320gb array right now but am upgrading the msata ssd soon. I had bought a Corsair 256gb M550 Msata SSD but it did not raid together proper with my older drives. After lots of trial and error I came to the conclusion the Physical sector size of 4kb was not compatible with the other three drives at 512byte physical sector size when used in a raid array. The logical sector size was 512byte for all drives but this didnt seem to make a difference as once the raid array was made and windows installed the disk was unreadable for boot and same setup was fine on the original LiteOn msata SSD. So ill likely throw in another Samsung Msata drive at 250gb size for a 960gb drivedrive array at 4x 240gb.

anyway the lite on 80gb likely dropped my performance some that i had at those other 3 ssd in a 3way raid0 array. So you definitely want to have similar performing drives. You always can mix and match sizes it just uses the smallest drive capacity when combined. You can also mix and match SSD controllers as my Samsung drives and my OCZ work just fine together.

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  • 2 weeks later...

There's no technical issues with putting SSDs in RAID 0. That said, I wouldn't put anything that I didn't have backups of on one. If you have the money, RAID 6 is really the way to go, since you'll have a performance increase over a single SSD but won't lose all your data when one drive in the array fails. Of course, there's a lot fewer parts that can break on an SSD, so it might be slightly safer than a RAID 0 on HDDs.

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