SSD - RAID or not?

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by SpecChum, Nov 25, 2014.

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To RAID or not to RAID?

  1. RAID IT!

    12 vote(s)
    41.4%
  2. DON'T BOTHER!

    17 vote(s)
    58.6%
  1. SpecChum

    SpecChum Master Guru

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    I've just had delivered a new 256Gb MX100 SSD to compliment the same one I've got installed.

    Shall I raid0 them or not?
     
  2. SpecChum

    SpecChum Master Guru

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    Void question now anyway, I didn't even open the 256Gb and bought a 512Gb instead lol

    Unopened 256Gb going back to Amazon...
     
  3. CalculuS

    CalculuS Ancient Guru

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    Well raid0 is a hassle but its worth it.
     
  4. Corrupt^

    Corrupt^ Ancient Guru

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    Really depends on the data residing on it:

    Is it important?

    Yes --> Don't RAID0 it.
    No --> RAID0 for more performance.
     

  5. Clawedge

    Clawedge Guest

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    "what do you want to do with it" is the right question
     
  6. SpecChum

    SpecChum Master Guru

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    Nothing lol

    I mentioned above that I got a 512Gb drive as well so I'm sending the unopened 256Gb back
     
  7. jase240

    jase240 Guest

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    I don't think RAID0 on an SSD is a bad idea, it's a lot safer than RAID0 on an HDD.
     
  8. Tree Dude

    Tree Dude Guest

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    Something to keep in mind is that the OS will not see the RAID set as an SSD (because it will be presented to the OS as a generic logical drive). Which means trim and garbage collection won't be done by the OS. Some drives are better than others at doing this themselves, but it could hurt the life of the drives in the long run.

    Also if you are doing this with an onboard SATA controller you will loose a whole bunch of your performance to overhead because those dinky little controllers are only really suited for single drives. You need a proper RAID controller to see the real benefit. All in all its a pain to do right and completely not worth it IMO.
     
  9. IcarusLSC

    IcarusLSC Active Member

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    It's good up to three drives right now. I like the raid arrays on the past few systems I've done, a lot snappier then singles, and with editing videos etc its great for speed. Load times are slightly better than singles if that matters etc...

    I'd do it again. I look for them on sale, and buy one or two, then get another 1 or 2 and spread 'em out on different systems. I have 4x240GB Intel 530's on this one in Raid 0, a couple 530's in another, and 3x64GB C300 Crucials in my original system I built with sdds. I have two other systems with single ssds. I do back-ups too on platter drives. I like the raided ones best :)
     
  10. Tree Dude

    Tree Dude Guest

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    Are you using the onboard controllers for those RAIDs? Having a dedicated controller with some cache would be a much better solution for a 4x RAID 0. Your seek time is going to go up without a cache buffer to give the controller time to parse the striped data. Granted it will be nowhere near a spinning disk, but it certainly could effect how "snappy" the drives feel and throughput when handling lots of small files.

    I am considering doing a RAID 0 as my 256GB MX100 is starting to feel quite small and I don't want to spend double what I paid for it to replace it with a 512GB drive. I only do OS and game installs on my C drive anyway and my data is protected with cloud backups.
     

  11. h4rm0ny

    h4rm0ny Guest

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    Nonono!

    Is your data important?

    Yes --> Back it up.
    No --> Don't back it up.

    RAID has nothing to do with this either way.
     
  12. IcarusLSC

    IcarusLSC Active Member

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    Yes Tree Dude, I'm using the onboard. Its works fine for 3 drives as I mentioned, and 4 doesn't add much. I agree a controller would help, but I don't want to spend the cash as these seem fast enough for me so far.

    Backups are the important thing for any setup, raid or not, if you want to keep your data :)
     
  13. Corrupt^

    Corrupt^ Ancient Guru

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    That's just extra common sense but assuming data is important one shouldn't got for a RAID0 tbh.
     
  14. h4rm0ny

    h4rm0ny Guest

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    There's a way around that. You can use Storage Spaces which are available in Windows 8 onwards. (Might only be the Professional version of Windows though, not sure). This is MS's newer enterprise file system and you can set up mirrored volumes across different drives. With Storage Spaces, unlike doing RAID yourself directly, it will know that they are SSDs and perform the usual SSD functions. However, I'm not kidding with Storage Spaces - they really are designed for the Enterprise and can be very fiddly if a drive goes down and you don't have another to immediately hot-swap in.

    So I don't recommend this. Just mentioning this as an interesting way around what Tree Dude has said.
     
  15. h4rm0ny

    h4rm0ny Guest

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    No, really disagree here. RAID is irrelevant either way. If you have backups, data is safe. If you don't, it is not. Thinking you need to worry less about backups because you're not using RAID-0, is foolhardy. I'm really against your advice here because I really think it is not good to even consider RAID or not RAID as being a factor in whether or not your important data is safe. Backed up = safe. Not backed up = at risk.
     

  16. Tree Dude

    Tree Dude Guest

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    You can both mirror (RAID 1) or stripe (RAID 0) with Windows. However these are software solutions, which means there is even more overhead and performance loss when compared to a hardware SATA controller. They are more designed for flexibility rather than raw performance. I have used mirroring before, it is great for adding a backup drive without having trust your SATA controller doesn't destroy the volume when you change it to a RAID 1.
     

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