Upgrading to SSDs in RAID 0

Although I have never tried this setup myself (because I think an SSD Raid is pretty useless in real life), I would think that this should work. You have to make sure that you properly align the SSDs because you restore from an image. SSD Alignment You also have to define a primary, active partition to which you restore the OS. And if you have a 100MB active partition, things get a bit more complicated. You find some guidance here: SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System

With all that being said, I would recommend to install only one SSD for the OS and leave the user data on the rapters. For the OS, the R/W speeds are pretty irrelevant because the OS deals with small blocks or 4K and 8K. It is the access time that accounts for the superb performance - and that is the same for a single SSD or a Raid. Thus there is nothing to be gained and you only complicate your life.

But if you think that Raid is your life, get a Revo drive ( Newegg.com - ocz revodrive x2 ) - provided you have a PCI-e x4 on your board.

FORGET the R/W speeds when it comes to the OS. Access time rules the OS - and that is 0.1ms for an SSD versus appr. 12 to 15ms for your rapters.

R/W speed buys you something if you shove a lot of data - but the OS does not do that. Keep your rapters for the data and one SSD for the system. It is cheaper and more efficient-

snit3 said:

whs: Thanks for the links and info. That's what I was looking for. You're probably right about the RAID and SSDs, but the Raptors in RAID 0 went from ~100 MBs stand alone to 190 MBs in Raid 0 configuration. That's practically the same as the individual SSDs!

From a read perspective that is correct. However, the value of the SSD is really it's ultra low random access time of 0.1ms across the entire disc that benefits your operating system. For running an OS, there aren't massive files that get read or massive files that get written. Think of it this way, if you have 3 x 5MB files to read....that's a total of 15MB. If you can read 100MB/sec...then you could read these files in .15 seconds. If you could read 300MB/sec, you could read the file in 0.05seconds. And if you could read them at 1,000MB/sec, you could read the file in 0.015seconds. The point is, it's always fractions of seconds....hardly noticeable.

RAID 0's are great for data drive (ONLY WHEN YOU HAVE A BACKUP THOUGH). This is where huge read/write performance benefits are needed.

I somewhat lost. When you have a ssd in raid 0 installing a backup to a hard drive that is that much slower than the ssd how can the read/write speed be any faster than the hard drive can except?

I would check into the Paragon Migration Tool and discuss with them whether they would properly migrate your current setup to a single SSD. Send them a mail, they are very good in answering.

The access time is a bit faster than I thought. But it is still 67 times slower than an SSD. Here are a couple of my SSDs as an example: