TR Forums

I ask this question because I have a spare Samsung 830 series 128 GB SSD just sitting around. My desktop already has one of those in it and my HTPC has a Corsair Force 3 90 GB in it. My laptop is 6 years old so not installing in that and my office PC is a Core 2 Duo which has a 150 GB WD Raptor. So any ideas what to do with? Is Raiding even sensible with SSDs? and no im not giving it away to one of you guys. lol.

ok, don't answer my question. I read some of the other posts and the consensus seems to be there is no point to RAID SSDs. So now I guess I can just let it sit around as a spare or install it in my system and install games on it. too bad I don't play PC games any more.

From what I've read in previous topics, no.

You don't have to RAID it, you could just convert your OS drive into a dynamic disk and add the 128GB 830 to it to increase the size of your c: drive.

Chrispy_ wrote:

You don't have to RAID it, you could just convert your OS drive into a dynamic disk and add the 128GB 830 to it to increase the size of your c: drive.

Ding ding! We have a weeiinar!

It's worth doing RAID-1 if you need the extra reliability. But given that you're not running a mission-critical server, that's not applicable here.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... ,3485.html

If you need the speed tomshardware test gets about 1GB/s speed.

jmc2

I would try it in the laptop, if it's something you use a lot. My wife's laptop was a 6+ year old dell that I put a 128GB M4 in and it made it a completely different machine to use. I can say that even more now that I bought her a new laptop that came with an SSD so I took the M4 out for my work desktop and put a 5400RPM laptop drive back into the laptop and it's almost unusable compared to what it felt like before. Just a thought.

jmc2 wrote:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

If you need the speed tomshardware test gets about 1GB/s speed.

jmc2

Sustained speeds are rarely an issue with modern SSDs.

Waco wrote:

jmc2 wrote:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

If you need the speed tomshardware test gets about 1GB/s speed.

jmc2

Sustained speeds are rarely an issue with modern SSDs.

It can still provide a boost for specific applications, but in general it's not a great idea, at least not for the OS partition. I'd happily RAID any number of SSDs (in 0+1 even) to get better performance in media editing software.

Airmantharp wrote:

It can still provide a boost for specific applications, but in general it's not a great idea, at least not for the OS partition. I'd happily RAID any number of SSDs (in 0+1 even) to get better performance in media editing software.

*Very* specific applications, sure.

Hence my "rarely an issue" comment.

ALIAS wrote:

I ask this question because I have a spare Samsung 830 series 128 GB SSD just sitting around. My desktop already has one of those in it and my HTPC has a Corsair Force 3 90 GB in it. My laptop is 6 years old so not installing in that and my office PC is a Core 2 Duo which has a 150 GB WD Raptor. So any ideas what to do with? Is Raiding even sensible with SSDs? and no im not giving it away to one of you guys. lol.

I would suggest trying the spare SSD in the laptop or office PC. The SSD would be much faster than the 150GB WD Raptor in your office PC. I recently added an SSD to a laptop running a Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz and the speed boost was substantial over the 7200rpm HDD that preceded it.

Spyder22446688 wrote:

ALIAS wrote:

I ask this question because I have a spare Samsung 830 series 128 GB SSD just sitting around. My desktop already has one of those in it and my HTPC has a Corsair Force 3 90 GB in it. My laptop is 6 years old so not installing in that and my office PC is a Core 2 Duo which has a 150 GB WD Raptor. So any ideas what to do with? Is Raiding even sensible with SSDs? and no im not giving it away to one of you guys. lol.

I would suggest trying the spare SSD in the laptop or office PC. The SSD would be much faster than the 150GB WD Raptor in your office PC. I recently added an SSD to a laptop running a Core 2 Duo 2.5GHz and the speed boost was substantial over the 7200rpm HDD that preceded it.

Older laptops/systems are prime targets for SSDs, like Spyder says. The real 'limitation' in PCs these days appears to be centered more on developers not coding with the possibility of SSDs in mind; even an overclocked quad-core can feel slow with an SSD installed.

The mentioned ideas are good, but you can also use it as a cache for hard drives.

RAID 0 on two SSDs:

Read performance better

Write performance sucks and gets suckier the longer you use it.

thanks for all the responses guy. someone suggested I use it in my office pc but it seems pointless to me. literally all I do with that PC is turn it on, run peachtree, print some checks or reports, and turn it back off. my laptop, the battery wont even last 1 hour anymore and ever since I bought an Asus MemoPad Smart 10, I really don't even use it. If the hybrid laptop/tablets were cheaper, that's what I would have bought but they are still over $1000. I could just wait until some i3 Haswell laptops come out and can find one for $400 or less, I could get that and put the SSD in that. In the end though, I still prefer the desktop PC over the portable devices. call me old school.

Nec_V20 wrote:

RAID 0 on two SSDs:
Read performance better
Write performance sucks and gets suckier the longer you use it.

Also, a failure in any of the two SSDs will take all your data.

ALIAS wrote:

thanks for all the responses guy. someone suggested I use it in my office pc but it seems pointless to me. literally all I do with that PC is turn it on, run peachtree, print some checks or reports, and turn it back off. my laptop, the battery wont even last 1 hour anymore and ever since I bought an Asus MemoPad Smart 10, I really don't even use it. If the hybrid laptop/tablets were cheaper, that's what I would have bought but they are still over $1000. I could just wait until some i3 Haswell laptops come out and can find one for $400 or less, I could get that and put the SSD in that. In the end though, I still prefer the desktop PC over the portable devices. call me old school.

Unless you currently need more space in your primary PC, then I'd just keep the spare SSD sitting around, then. Perhaps wait until you do an OS reinstall, then swap in the 128GB 830 for the 90GB Corsair? I also have a 128GB 830 sitting around, and while it's wasted tech, I'm also avoiding the headcache involved with a pointless upgrade of a legacy system (like you hinted at).

Happily using a RAID 0 array with 2 Force 3 90Gb. Custom BIOS enabling TRIM. Only done it because I needed the extra space (90GB to OS wasn't enough) and SSD prices were high that time to buy a bigger one. Great performance, no problems so far

Chrispy_ wrote:

You don't have to RAID it, you could just convert your OS drive into a dynamic disk and add the 128GB 830 to it to increase the size of your c: drive.

Doing this is far more sensible:

• RAID0 doubles your chances of failure, and ALL of your data is lost when it does fail.
• An extended volume with dynamic disks in Windows will lose only the data on the failed drive. The other drive will be readable still.

The extra sequential speed from a RAID0 looks good in benchmarks but the actual load-time differences in day-to-day use will be negligible, if it's even possible to measure the difference at all.