RAID 0 or SSD

[aka.Goliath]

The question I want to know is say having 2 or even 3 HDD's in RAID 0 config going to give you the performance you get from a SSD. The only specs I have found of HDD's are the bus speeds like SATA 3.0 Gb/s which I know is not the actual read and write speeds. You can get SDD that have speeds in the area of 500 MB/s (+/- 4 Gb/s). Will RAID 0 give that kind of performance and what reliability do you get?

 

[NomNom]

Afaik the speed you will get will be around 150mb/sec from hdd's (guess) In other words you might aswell get a SSD if speed is really the objective for you.

 

[snobee]

Well with RAID 0 you will only get the reliability of the drive itself, there is zero redundancy. So you HOPE everything will go ok. If you really want great performace, then get two SSD and RAID 0 them. Of course, if you are looking for space, then you will be out of luck or seriously out of pocket as large capacity SSD's are very expensive.
I had an Extreme Corsair drive 256GB, and then changed to two 60GB in RAID 0. For me, the performance is noticeably better than the single 256GB extreme drive. To help with space I added a 1TB drive for my general junk, and then an 80GB SSD single drive for my OS. Overall, it was cheaper to do that than the single 256GB SSD extreme drive, and I am better off from a speed point of view. The RAID 0 config is just for my games, and compared to splitting the 256GB previously, I definitely am seeing a performance increase.
Anyway, to answer your question, I would choose the single SSD if it was a decision between a single SSD extreme drive and a normal SATA RAID 0 config. If you have a non-extreme SSD, then I would go with the SATA RAID 0 option.

 

[killadoob]

Regardless of the R/W ssd is massively faster so go ssd.

 

[SoWhat]

Well, my friend has 4x500GB in raid0 configuration and the speed is similar to the fastest SSD one can get as of Oct 2011 + the added bonus of more space. Of course, you must know what you are buying and what you are doing.

 

[Gnome]

Regardless of the R/W ssd is massively faster so go ssd.

Short and sweet answer and 100% true.

Technical answer:
For mechanical drives to match an SSDs bandwidth would take a few of the fastest drives available today.
In terms of latency a mechanical drive cannot even come close (not even the fastest available), no matter how many of them you RAID because RAID doesn't and cannot decrease latency.

An example of bandwidth is: How many lanes are there on a highway (more lanes = more cars can be moved). Imagine cars are data.

An example of latency is: How quickly can I drive on the highway.

If you copy large amounts of files, bandwidth is better. For the Operating System, lower latency will make it more responsive. The OS doesn't need high bandwidth because most of files are small but it does need to access many small files very quickly.

 

[shovenose]

Depends for what usage. As a boot drive a ssd. For scratch disks when doing video editing raid-0 config on a PCI-e raid controller all the way.

 

[shovenose]

Short and sweet answer and 100% true.

Technical answer:
For mechanical drives to match an SSDs bandwidth would take a few of the fastest drives available today.
In terms of latency a mechanical drive cannot even come close (not even the fastest available), no matter how many of them you RAID because RAID doesn't and cannot decrease latency.

An example of bandwidth is: How many lanes are there on a highway (more lanes = more cars can be moved). Imagine cars are data.

An example of latency is: How quickly can I drive on the highway.

If you copy large amounts of files, bandwidth is better. For the Operating System, lower latency will make it more responsive. The OS doesn't need high bandwidth because most of files are small but it does need to access many small files very quickly.

it has nothing to do with bandwidth. It just have faster access times than a mechanical hdd. It means it get loaded in the ram faster. Your pc will boot up faster and your applications will start quicker. That's it

A hdd mechanical ssd or whatever is only there for storage. Some are faster than other so it will read and write the data faster to disk but doesn't increase any bandwidth. The bandwidth are determined by the different busses eg like the QPI or the DMI. Each of them have a theoretical bandwidth and no hdd in the world ssd or whatever is next can increase that. Only overclock you pc can increase it. They can hide latency with bigger cpu caches because the cpu will get its data from the caches. It won't go chasing slowing down to a external speed like we use to get with the older cpus because the memory controllers are integrated..
So do not think a ssd or whatever sata device will give you better fps. It won't that data is loaded into the ram the cpu caches then you see it on the screen. Faster disks only means the application will start quicker.

 

[Gnome]

it has nothing to do with bandwidth. It just have faster access times than a mechanical hdd. It means it get loaded in the ram faster. Your pc will boot up faster and your applications will start quicker. That's it ...

Latency is access time. In electronic engineering the round trip wait is called latency. Therefore the time it takes the mechanical drive head to move and the data to move over the wire is the latency associated with a read or write.

Furthermore QPI, DMI aren't related to storage so not sure why you brought them up, my guess is you don't know what you are talking about. However let's talk about storage buses. Namely SATA. The BUS has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1.5-6 Gigabits depending on the version.

That however does not mean the mechanical drive has the throughput to fill that pipe. Throughput and Bandwidth are synonyms. Once again, the terms originate from analogue signal processing.

So once again, an SSD has lower latency than a mechanical drive and more bandwidth. But multiple mechanical drives in RAID-0 can have more bandwidth (in some situations).

 

[The_Unbeliever]

I would not touch a RAID-0 config with a long barge pole.

Because if one drive goes, you lose all your data.

Not worth it.

 

[killadoob]

Well, my friend has 4x500GB in raid0 configuration and the speed is similar to the fastest SSD one can get as of Oct 2011 + the added bonus of more space. Of course, you must know what you are buying and what you are doing.

A ssd will still whip that computer silly in terms of all round performance, you cannot get away from the access time of 9-14ms.

Lib you need to look at raid 0 as a normal single drive. You wouldn't leave all your important data on one single drive would you? Raid-0 is one drive.

 

[shovenose]

Latency is access time. In electronic engineering the round trip wait is called latency. Therefore the time it takes the mechanical drive head to move and the data to move over the wire is the latency associated with a read or write.

Furthermore QPI, DMI aren't related to storage so not sure why you brought them up, my guess is you don't know what you are talking about. However let's talk about storage buses. Namely SATA. The BUS has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1.5-6 Gigabits depending on the version.

That however does not mean the mechanical drive has the throughput to fill that pipe. Throughput and Bandwidth are synonyms. Once again, the terms originate from analogue signal processing.

So once again, an SSD has lower latency than a mechanical drive and more bandwidth. But multiple mechanical drives in RAID-0 can have more bandwidth (in some situations).

latency is that time when you click on the app and when it starts.
ssd disks mechanical hdd has nothing to do with bandwith. for data to get transfered from one point to another it has to go through all those buses where each has its theoritical bandwith. The drives will just read and write the data faster but it has effect on the bandwidth inside your pc. Its only there for storage. Latency is directly related to the hdd spindle speeds and its solely influenced by its spindle characteristics. And latency is only a factor with multiple random reads of sectors. Reading large continuous blocks it plays no factor. The days they use cylinder head skewing to reduce it. A 15000 rpm drive got a latency of around 1ms.

But ssds have latency as well
http://www.storage-switzerland.com/Articles/Entries/2010/10/11_Solving_The_SSD_Latency_Bug.html
This is raid on a dedicated PCI-e raid controller

Check the raid-0 performance

That's a cheap skate controller still. You still get the ageia's which blow that out of the water