To Raid 0 or not - 2 x Samsung Evo 250GB

Hi All,

I will very soon be adding a 2nd Samsung EVO 250GB SSD to my system and wandering if it is worth putting them in RAID 0 or not? on a Sabertooth FX990 R2.0 MoBo

I use it for gaming only really, I am not overly bothered about the data as just OS and games/steam which is all backed up via Crashplan & I have NAS for normal storage. I am reading mixed views on on the web about real world results.

Thoughts?

 

TIA

I think RAID 0 would be better suited to HDDs, and the performance benefit on SSDs should be minuscule.

You should test it. It's the only way to determine real world performance. If the performance is preferable, then keep that RAID configuration.

Yes, you are right i need to try and test a few simple load times etc.

I was trying to avoid reinstalls etc but I think I can simply clone the HDD then carry out the RAID 0 test and if not impressed put the clone back on.

 

I will share my thoughts & results soon.

I did see a test with 4 or 5 SSDs in RAID 0 and there actually was quite a performance boost. However the performance boost was seen with benchmarking tools. In practical uses, you might not see the benefits, i.e., is a program loading in .5 seconds really better than it loading in .3 seconds under a RAID configuration? RAID configurations are nice with hdds but they might not really be worth it with SSDs except under certain circumstances. I do recomend RAID 1, or other levels that have redundancy implemented, when using SSDs. SSDs are subject to much greater data corruption than HDDs. I personally have had many issues with broken drivers and applications because of bad data on my SSD.

Also, while I don't have a RAID configuration in my personal rig, I've heard that it can use up quite a bit of your computers processing power if using an on-board controller. I've heard it's only useful if you have a RAID card with a dedicated processor on the card.

Raid 0 on ssd should ONLY be if you want to unify drive size.  I have 2 x 120gb corsair force 3 and the only reason i do RAID 0 is because my drive size is too small on their own.  Improvement aren't even noticeable, and OS loading is actually slower than running off of a single drive.  As well as forcing the BIOS to run another string before loading the bootstrapper for the OS.  My BIOS takes an extra 3 seconds to reach the bootstrap because it has to load the RAID configuration.

Also RAID can hinder certain functions like TRIM, SMART checking, and some other functions as well.  TRIM is quite a big thing on SSD so that they have longer lifespan.  Unless you're trying to unify drive sizing i don't think that having RAID 0 on an SSD is useful.

The only reason I like to use RAID because it merges the drives. RAID actually slows down random transfers. It does, however, speed up sequential transfers.