intel 160GB ssd or 80GB x 2 ?

[rabident]

Price difference is negligible when using x58 onboard raid 0. I make regular backups, so drive failure isn't an issue. My only concern is speed. For real world performance is a single drive better or a raid of 2 half size/priced drives?

I have 2 hardware ram drives raided now. It really helps with the benchmark stats for sequential read/write, but perceptually sometimes they feel slower raided than stand alone. Only thing I can think of is maybe the typical raid driver/controllers aren't well optimized for the super fast random access time with modern SSD drives and that adds additional latency that slows everything but STR based benchmarks down?

Storage Review's old raid 0 tests put a single raptor faster than dual in many real world cases. I'm wondering if that's more or less the case with SSD?

 

[hhara]

Also keep in mind TRIM isnt supported if you did Raid 0. So longevity of two 80s in Raid 0 will not be as long as 1 160

 

[Makaveli@BETA]

ya also you can't even run the intel optimizer on a raid volume, which would be a backup option without trim.

 

[chanchan]

With mechanical hard drives, when running in a RAID 0 setup, especially when adding more disks, random read/write becomes slower and slower because they have to all sync up if my memory serves me correctly.

In the case of SSD's there really isn't any latency when reading and writing to blocks, and since you have two drives in a stripe setup your performance improved by quite a bit. With my two cheapie SSD's my performance numbers are basically doubled!