RAID 2x SSD best way to do it?

Hardware Hub Storage
1

When Zen launches I am going to retire my old Ivy bridge system and build an all new team red pc.

Based on pricing, it is cheaper for me to buy 2 500GB ssd's than to buy 1 1TB ssd. (Because reasons i guess?) So I was going to buy a pair of 500's and RAID 0 them. If I did this (it would be my boot drive) would it be a good idea to use a raid controller? If so can I get a recommendation?

Also depending on what is available on the AM4 platform, is a raid card even doable if both ssd's are M.2

Is onboard raid good enough to handle two drives or am I asking for trouble?

2

Are you planning to use these for boot or just to hold games?

IMO RAID 0 or similar is just asking for trouble, either use them as two seperate SSD's or place them into a mirrored arrangement either with RAID 1 or a storage-pool if on Win 10.

3

Id just buy the 1TB drive if its a boot drive. How much extra would you pay ?

If you go raid you have to make sure trim is working etc on the hardware. More headache than needed I would say.

1 Like
4

Aside from redundancy is there a point to having raid outside of a server system?

5


I posted this before my system running on 2x 120GB SSD's RAID 0 and 1x 240GB SSD still haven't bothered to check why my 240GB is slower than it should be, it really should be running faster. but yeah if you want your C: speeds to be freaking stupid then go for it, use some decent ones and yeah check if TRIM is supported on that model and what others experiences were with those drives in RAID terrible or great. Basically tread carefully, do your homework and also don't store your important stuff there, When I was running in RAID 0 I had a 2TB Hitachi drive that all my crap lived on instead of my C: Along with a duplicate of that data on a RAID 5 array of 3 WD Black 1TB drives. The only games I installed on the SSD's were ones that had really long loading times and would get a benefit from loading from a really fast storage device, eg. Any of the stalker games.
Also using some software to make a backup image of your C: weekly for quick recovery to a single boot device in case one of your SSD's decides to die unexpectedly or something. So really what I'm trying to say is you shouldn't RAID 0 two SSD's unless you really want to and are prepared to do all the other things to keep your data safe.

6

You don't want your data to live very long do you....you probably don't need the speed it gives you, if you do buy a 950 SSD

7

I would say no, no real reason for fake raid SSDs. The KISS principle is a good one. If you want to experiment, sure go for it. But be prepared to do your research and keep your backups updated.