is throwing a couple of these SSDs in RAID0 worthwhile?

jorpe

New member
Newegg.com - Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Solid State Disks

I'm looking at getting 2 of these to put in RAID0 for my boot and application drive as the price seems reasonable for what has to be a huge performance increase from the 1tb 16mb cache drive I have now. $225 is about what I have to budget for this upgrade. Are there better options? I realize this is an MLC drive.

I can see where I can get this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148318 drive for a similar price and lose 16gb but gain a lot of write speed. For a boot drive + office + tunebite + napster which option would be a better idea? or other suggestions?
 

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One thing to keep in mind with these drives and the specs...is that the specs list the sequential read and write speeds of the drives. So, while lots of other drives have much faster sequential write speeds than the Intel drives...the Intel drive really shines with random I/O writes and that is what happens 95% of the time that you run applications and your OS on the drive. Thus, even though the specs are lower on the Intel, the Intel almost always wins out in benchmark tests and such which expose real world usage.

You might want to keep your eye open for the Intel X25-M G2 80GB drive. These can be found around the $250-$275 area and would give a huge performance bump over your existing drive without having to implement a RAID array to have sufficient storage space available.
 

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^^+1.
Get the Intel 80 GB, you get the same capacity without RAID initialization delay during boot
 

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