I currently have a intel 330 SSD, about 3ish years old and has been used as a OS drive, I got about 15k running hours on it, though not all that many rewrites. I'd expect I have copied about 3-4ish terrabytes total onto it.
Intels SSD toolbox thingy shows that the drive is 100% healthy, no errors or anything like that. Speed is currently just like I got it out of the box, and oddly enough 40 MB/sec above what is stated in the datasheet on both read and write.
So seeing how reliable ssds seem to be, would it be a good idea to get another one of the same type and capacity to raid it with? instead of buying a new SSD. I'd get just over 1gb/sec read/write and 240gigs total, with another one that would jump by another 50ish percent.
Is this a risky move? is there a high chance of my current one to fail soon due to its age?
not worth RAID'ing, chuck it and get a new one. (IMO)
The Intel 330 is just under two years old and sports a Sandforce 2281 controller coupled with Intel's own 25nm MLC NAND. This combination typically produces a performance profile that struggles with incompressible data and favours reading over writing. With peak and average sequential read/write speeds of 514/138 and 414/122 the Intel 330 is unable to compete in today's market and falls over 50% short of the group leaders which manage peak sequential read/write speeds in the 500/300 MB/s region. Small file 4K peak and average speeds are better and clocked in at 32/89 and 24/63 MB/s which is 10% below the group leaders. Overall the 330 has an effective speed of 370 MB/s which makes it one of the slowest 128GB SSDs I have seen to date.
Yeah pretty much anything like the 850 EVO would have way better read/writes. Your SSD is obsolete currently. Furthermore, SSD's while they can be RAID'ed, are not worth the headache for the minimal gains, as compared to the new M.2 SSD's.
If you clicked my link you would know. Its about 10% faster(in terms of read), much much faster write speeds, and random read speeds. Way more all around better.
You are correct about SATA III being the bottleneck; which is why M.2 is the way to go. And passive cooling from the fans inside of you pc are enough to keep it cool.
Don't chuck it... and don't raid it. You can use it as a cache drive or put games onto it. If it isn't fast enough for you, then store your important documents on it and just let it sit around holding it. Or put it in a laptop. Yes, it's old as hell, but it's still an SSD.