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Hello gerbils,
I need an advice. My old laptop died (which is fine, it had its age) and left me with orphan SSD. It is kinda slugish 128GB Crucial V4 with 230/175 MB/s of read/write performance. I am thinking of new purpose for it and since I find system drive in my main rig (fast-ish 120GB Intel 330 with 500/450MB/s of read/write) a bit too small I was thinking - would putting the two in RAID0 work well? Would there be a significant performance penalty? Can rapid storage/boot feature of my Z77 chipset be used with two SSDs with different performance?
Thanks for your help, opinions and experience.

If you are going such an odd raid config I'd recommend raid 1 for the redundancy.

If either of those two ssd's in raid 0 die you loose all your data. And let me tell you, when an SSD dies, it dies spectacularly.

I wouldn't bother with RAID. Use the fast drive as your boot disk, and use the slower SSD as your cache drive (virtual memory, browser cache, windows temp, adobe scratch disks, etc).

I dont store sensitive data on an SSD nor do I care about redundancy. I just want to expand available space on drive which gives me good loading/boot times. I know its a bit exotic, I just want to know how would it behave and if its worth of giving it a try.

I have no Idea how that caching works. Gues I got myself a homework - I ll read something on it.

I think your performance may end up being lower than what you have right now. It might be a lot of work just to figure that out.

Have you considered just adding the slower SSD to your computer, no RAID or anything? Use it to install new applications, and maybe offload a few existing applications if you are running out of room on the OS drive. Your system will boot up the same, and you won't have to go through all the work of building the array, reinstalling your OS, and reinstalling all your programs.

You can put smaller programs or those with less demands regarding loading time on the older SSD for the best balance.

dodozoid wrote:

I dont store sensitive data on an SSD nor do I care about redundancy. I just want to expand available space on drive which gives me good loading/boot times. I know its a bit exotic, I just want to know how would it behave and if its worth of giving it a try.

I have no Idea how that caching works. Gues I got myself a homework - I ll read something on it.

Add the slow Kingston to the system as a regular drive. Install whatever you want to it. Don't bother with RAID 0. You're not going to see any gains....

Add as a regular drive, or use it in another system.
RAID0 is usually 2x the performance of the slower drive, which in this case isn't even half that of your faster one.

You can probably use mklink to move certain directories/programs over to the Kingston.

Why not just use them in a JBOD setup? Or maybe a pooled setup or with symlinks as jihadjoe suggested?

In RAID 0 you'd basically be limited to 2x the slowest specs of either SSD. In a JBOD setup as I understand it you'd only take a performance hit when files get to the slower drive. In a symlink setup you could just have different folders as one, and if for some reason one drive died, you could read files off the other instead of losing everything.

I wouldn't recommend using the V4 for much at all - it's an awful SSD and it's barely worth using as a cache drive.
Stick it in a USB3 enclosure and use it as an awesome memory stick?

I remember reading a review (Anand or StorageReview) and whilst it's quoted for 2000-8000 IOPS I think they ascertained that it was an awful controller and 2000 IOPS was a runaway marketing lie. It's barely faster than a good 7200 RPM drive with NCQ and plenty of cache.