To raid or not to raid

[WolfSoul]

Well this isn't exactly a problem.. more a question
I got a COZ vertex 2 160 GB and Im thinking bout another one
Now Im thinking bout using the second to put games on
Of course raid would be faster.. but I don't know
Besides 1 disk breaks the whole array is gone
What's anyone else doing with more than 1 SSD btw

 

[pparks1]

The biggest advantage to an SSD is it's incredibly low access time to any file on the drive....this doesn't improve in a RAID configuration.

Personally, I don't have 2 SSD's in the same box...heck I don't have 2 SSD's period.

If it were me, I would run one SSD for my OS only and run a second SSD with my games on it. This should increase your performance a small bit, without the complexities of RAID and the issues when 1 drive fails. Plus, this easily allows you to image each of the drives separately for backup purposes with something like Macrium, Paragon, Acronis, etc.

 

[bassfisher6522]

I agree whole harditly with pparks1. If you do want to dabble with a raid set up, get a couple of cheap/inexpenisve hardrives and start with raid 0, then expirement with 1, 5 and 10 but in those set ups a minimum of 3 hard drives it required. This little video gives you the basics of riad. It's a little cheesy but the idea is explained.

HowStuffWorks Videos "Episode 8 - RAID Explained"

 

[WolfSoul]

Ive had a raid before.. it was with 2 samsung Spinpoints.. but I think I felt rather uncomfortable with it
besides.. like you said I believe SSDs are already great in speed without even raid

 

[diehrd]

Raid them the speed difference justifies it and the drives should be a lot more durable then rotating disk technology of yesterday

 

[pparks1]

In benchmarks it will look great. Check real life performance. For example, lets say that you open up Call of Duty Black Ops and it loads 750MB of texture files into video RAM. Let's say the standard SSD loads them in 200MB/sec. So, it would take 3.75 seconds to load the textures. Let's say a RAID 0 config sped you up to 375MB/sec so that would drop you from 3.75 seconds to 2.0. So, coupled with the processing time of the video card...which should be the same....he question is whether that 1.75 seconds is worth it. And lets assume that you have a spinner hard drive that runs at 85MB/sec. That drive would take 9 seconds to load that file.....dropping from 9 to 3.75 is a 5.25 second difference. The drop yet again with a RAID setup would only be 2 more seconds...so, only about 1/3 the improvement of going to the SSD.

The other thing to consider is lets say that you were loading the game and it only loaded up a 175MB texture file. On a single SSD, that would take .875 seconds. Now, with the RAID configuration, it only takes 0.47 seconds...can you really see the 0.405 second difference?

On the flip side, if you used these drives for storage, and needed to make a backup copy of your 21,500MB virtual hard drive file...with the Single SSD it would take 1min and 47 seconds...but with the RAID configuration it would take 57 seconds. If you were doing massively large file copies all day, that RAID would be awesome and hugely beneficial. But you likely aren't using 2 x SSD drives for storage.

 

[WolfSoul]

I was bout to ask that... would I really notice the difference?

 

[thehappyman]

Hi WolfSoul - I agree with pparks too but for slightly different reasons (though his reasoning is valid as well). I used 10,000 rpm raptors in Raid 0 very heavily every day for 3 years and never had any disk problems (so I was lucky) and I did appreciate the speed bump and the increased volume size - BUT, BUT - the OCZ's don't have "Garbage Collection", they use TRIM support and Wear Leveling to prevent SSD performance degradation.

And Windows 7 DOES support the SSD TRIM command - BUT, BUT - the TRIM wont work (at this time) if the drives are setup in a RAID configuration. Someday they'll get TRIM to work in a RAID system but it hasnt happened yet.

I think you're better off with using the second SSD as a "second system drive" for your games. I have two SSD's and thats what I've done. I also moved the majority of my page file to the second SSD. I have 12 GB of ram and I'm one of those folks that harbors the notion that the page file should be equal in size to the installed ram - so I moved 11 GB of the page file to the second SSD and only keep 1 GB of it on the OS boot SSD. I've tried to setup the OS SSD so that it gets written to as little as possible and I've tried to keep the amount of used space on it to a minimum. All I keep on the primary SSD is the OS and my system programs.

I don't want to see degradation in either SSD but keeping the OS SSD as fast as possible (over the long haul) is my primary goal. So far it's been working pretty well - I use my rig for maybe 8 hours a day and so far (after 7 months) my SSD's read and write speeds haven't deteriorated at all.

This is just what I do personally, we all do our own thing, don't we ...... Cheers

 

[pparks1]

I have 12 GB of ram and I'm one of those folks that harbors the notion that the page file should be equal in size to the installed ram

You aren't alone. I have 8GB of RAM, and I set my pagefile to 1.5x my RAM. So, I've given 12GB to the page file, all of it on my spinner drive. While my page file is hardly ever touched, I've also got over 500GB free on my 1TB drive...so I don't need the space for anything else.

 

[WolfSoul]

8 GB RAM here too.. and don't have a second SSD yet btw, was just throwing this out here
The SSD thing also still feels rather new to me

 

[society misfit]

pparks1: I agree with your theory, but you can apply the same with every piece of hardware. How much of a real world difference did you notice after OC’ing your CPU?

I actually don’t see what the fuss is over RAID. Having your data on 2 RAID0 drives is just the same amount of risk as having it on 1 single drive. You lose 1 drive you lose it ALL! And I think we can all agree that SSD drives are much less susceptible to failure than mechanical! Perform routine backups as you would with any configuration and you will be good as gold!

I run 2 Corsair Force 120 SSD’s in RAID0 and the performance is phenomenal!! Surpassing the claimed manufactures speeds on a SATAIII port! I’ve attached a ATTO benchmark, the SSD’s in RAID0 is on the right (a 1TB WD green drive is on the left!)

 

[pparks1]

pparks1: I agree with your theory, but you can apply the same with every piece of hardware. How much of a real world difference did you notice after OC’ing your CPU?

Yes you can and you should. If nothing but benchmarks really show improvement, why bother in the first place? My overclock did very, very little performance wise. I notice a bit of a difference...about 10% when I am re-encoding DVD's or using Sony Vegas Movie HD to convert my AVCHD 1080p digital camcorder files into smaller digital movie files....with everything else, there is no noticeable difference whatsover. But since I primarily use my machine for video file editing, the 10% gain and 1 degree increase in associated temp was worth it to me.

I actually don’t see what the fuss is over RAID. Having your data on 2 RAID0 drives is just the same amount of risk as having it on 1 single drive. You lose 1 drive you lose it ALL!

Yes, but since you have 2 physical discs which "could" potentially fail...you have increased the possibility of failure.

I run 2 Corsair Force 120 SSD’s in RAID0 and the performance is phenomenal!!

Did you check performance with a single Corsair F120 SSD installed? I bet performance is still phenomenal.

 

[Wishmaster]

I have 2 SSDs, but do not Raid them. Just run them as single discs.

The main one I installed Win7 and all apps on.
I have 1 spinner for Music,Videos, Pictures Etc and another spinner for Games.

The second SSD I use for the main PF, & certain Games.
Mostly the ones that hit the HD often, or a new game Im playing.

Some Games I can not tell any difference being on the SSD, others it helps alot.

 

[Cr00zng]

Not all RAID controllers created equal, some maybe able to support the increased bandwidth of two SSD drives in RAID 0 while others may not. As such, the RAID 0 performance may or may not be near linear when compared to a single drive.

While a single SSD drive makes any machine faster, two would make it even faster, it is still the slowest subsystem of the PC. Building RAID x with SSDs makes sense as long as the technology catches up with the SSD RAID. Intel's Sandy Bridge isn't it for motherboard based RAID since its throughput maxis out at 6Gbs or 750MBs. With 150MBs used up by the protocol overhead, it leaves maximum of 600 MBs actual data transfer. Put two C300 SSD drives, each with 350MBs read speed, in to RAID 0 and these drives won't perform at their max. Then there's the "coming soon" Vertex 3 Pro SSD capable to do 550MBs read speed, it would be a waste to put them into a RAID 0 using the motherboard RAID controller.

The available bandwidth is one of the reasons why OCZ moving the SSD into a PCIe x4 slot with the OCZ RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD; the 20Gbs transfer rate of PCIe x4 ought to be enough for awhile at least. Most of the add on SSD RAID cards also require a PCIe x4 slot as well to support the required bandwidth.

The PCI x4 lane can be made available for RAID on the motherboard, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon. Until the technology catches up with the SSD drives, pparks1 is right; in real life, placing two SSD drives in to RAID 0 isn't going to give you much improvement. Here's a link that recently tested SSD RAID 0:

Corsair Force Series F90 Solid State Drive RAID Report - Benchmarks - PCMark Vantage Hard Disk Tests :: TweakTown USA Edition

In benchmark tests yes, two drives are faster; throw in PCMark Vantage benchmarks and the RAID 0 looses its edge.

 

[WolfSoul]

Well anyway I have a P7P55D-E Evo

 

[Maguscreed]

The biggest advantage to an SSD is it's incredibly low access time to any file on the drive....this doesn't improve in a RAID configuration.

Personally, I don't have 2 SSD's in the same box...heck I don't have 2 SSD's period.

If it were me, I would run one SSD for my OS only and run a second SSD with my games on it. This should increase your performance a small bit, without the complexities of RAID and the issues when 1 drive fails. Plus, this easily allows you to image each of the drives separately for backup purposes with something like Macrium, Paragon, Acronis, etc.

I fully support this post. This is the way I am currently configured on my primary box, only it's standard drives. the thinking is the same. I actually keep the pagefile on yet a third drive. The performance over a straight forward config is noticeable even with standard drives.

 

[WolfSoul]

After checking that link.. when I look at gaming seems a single SSD beats out RAID 0 in that test

 

[Golden]

I actually don’t see what the fuss is over RAID. Having your data on 2 RAID0 drives is just the same amount of risk as having it on 1 single drive. You lose 1 drive you lose it ALL!

Hi,

I'm afraid that is not correct. Since the RAID has two disks in it, you have doubled the chance of failure (doubled your risk). Basic probability theory.

Whilst a RAID0 across SSD yields better performance from a benchmarking perspective, in real-world scenarios its not a good idea. In my experience RAID0's real advantage lies in sustained (several hours and days) WRITE, not as much READ.

Since we all know that SSD's live longer by minimising WRITE activity to them, it seems logical not to use them in high level WRITE environment (e.g. several extremely large Gigabyte size data files written too constantly over several days or a few weeks), unless you have an extremely large budget.

My opinion is :

Single SSD - for OS and program files
Multiple HDD (in RAID or not) - for data files/storage/backup

Regards,
Golden

 

[WolfSoul]

Im guessing a second for games is a bad idea then

 

[society misfit]

pparks1: I agree with your theory, but you can apply the same with every piece of hardware. How much of a real world difference did you notice after OC’ing your CPU?

Yes you can and you should. If nothing but benchmarks really show improvement, why bother in the first place? My overclock did very, very little performance wise. I notice a bit of a difference...about 10% when I am re-encoding DVD's or using Sony Vegas Movie HD to convert my AVCHD 1080p digital camcorder files into smaller digital movie files....with everything else, there is no noticeable difference whatsover. But since I primarily use my machine for video file editing, the 10% gain and 1 degree increase in associated temp was worth it to me.

I actually don’t see what the fuss is over RAID. Having your data on 2 RAID0 drives is just the same amount of risk as having it on 1 single drive. You lose 1 drive you lose it ALL!

Yes, but since you have 2 physical discs which "could" potentially fail...you have increased the possibility of failure.

I run 2 Corsair Force 120 SSD’s in RAID0 and the performance is phenomenal!!

Did you check performance with a single Corsair F120 SSD installed? I bet performance is still phenomenal.

Very true, but we cannot safe guard ourselves for every possible failure or incident. Approximately 15 years ago my home was broken into and approximately 400 CD’s were stolen. All the insurance in the world could not replace the time and effort I put into that collection. Sorry for the dark comparison!

I originally purchased only 1 SSD on sale and was so blown away by its performance I grabbed another before the sale ended (2 x120GB of SSD drives was cheaper than most single 160GB SSD drives!!!). Set up the RAID0 out of curiosity. Unfortunately I did not record any real life performance between the 2 setups. Fully agree that benchmarks do not reflect real life performance and should be taken with a grain of salt. But a benchmarked 270MB/s for a single SSD vs 460MB/s RAID reads must speak for something… even if it is only a small increase in real world performance.

The bottom line is we all strive for a faster machine!