Best SSD solution; 2 Corsair Force 3 120 gig in a raid 0 or a single 512 Gig 840 PRO

raglafart

raglafart

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 21, 2013
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227
I've put more money into my build than makes any sense!
Ah well, you only live once.

My current drive is a Crucial M4 256 gig.
I decided that I'd up the spec to the Samsung 512 gig 840 PRO as the one I found was an excellent price and the specs were that much better than the Crucial M4
The idea was that the Crucial would then become my scratch drive.
I already had a Corsair Force 3 120 gig SSD that I'd set up Ubuntu on. I then thought that maybe getting another Corsair Force 3 120 gig drive and setting up a raid 0 may be a better option than the Samsung unit again using the Crucial M4 again as the scratch drive.
I use a 2 TB Seagate drive for archiving and back ups.
Would there be any speed advantage using the Raid 0 on the smaller Corsair drives or would I be better of using the Samsung? I’m not short on disc space and 120 gig would be more than enough for the operating system and programs I use.
Then again, would a pair of M4 256 gig SSD’s set up in the RAID 0 be a better solution and use the Corsair drive as the scratch drive?

Most of the work I’m doing is with Adobe CS 6
Any advice appreciated
Cheers John

My machine spec is:
MB Asus P9 X79 PRO, CPU i7 3960 running at 4.3 gig, 64 gig G Skill F3-17000CL11Q2-64GBZLD 30 gig as a ram disc and 8 gig as a ram cache, Gigabyte HD 7850 graphic card.
 
Well, I can't say about raiding the Corsair drives but I have raided a couple of intel 160gb G2 drives. They are second gen intel SSD's 'slow' by todays standards but still infinitely faster than HDDs. Anywho, I had two of the set to RAID 0 on Win7 for some time. Eventually I broke up the raid and ran just one of the intel drives and to be honest I didn't notice any difference in boot time. If there was any difference in load time for games it was minimal. So, moral to the story is while on paper RAID 0 IS faster, whether or not you will actually notice it is a different story. Boot to Windows for me may have been a bit faster with a single drive as it did not have to load the RAID drivers. Also, make sure that TRIM is supported in RAID. Many SSD makers won't support TRIM in RAID configurations. I'd go with just the single SSD but that's just me.
 
I believe in the real world the 840 PRO will be faster (better IOPS / 4K low queue depth #s) than the RAID 0 however you may not be able to tell the difference.
 
Many thanks for the replies.
The added hassle of the RAID 0, compared to the negligible performance gain doesn't seem to be worthwhile then.
When the Samsung 840 PRO arrives I'll do a clean instal and use the Crucial as the second drive that I'll partition and set up my scratch drive on that which was pretty much the original plan.
Cheers John
 
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