USB3 and RAID0

FapCop

FapCop

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So I want to enjoy the speeds of SSD and move away from standard slow hard drives, but there is two things putting me off. Small drive size and drive decay.

I would get a few more hard drives and just RAID0 them, but I can only fit one HDD in case and I REALLY like my case. Not willing to replace it for any reason. I know USB3 isn't quite as fast as an SSD, but it's a hell of a lot faster than a regular hard drive, so I figured, why not stripe seven 128GB flash drives in Raid0? It's a shlep to get windows to boot from USB, but it's not impossible, done it before. I don't care about redundancy, just speed.

Is this a stupid idea?
 
Okay, one think I didn't think about. You can't configure software raid during windows installation. Not going to work. Nevermind :)
 
Was a dumb idea anyway. :D Just get a SSD and you will never look back. I won't go back to normal drives.
 
Last edited:
Arksun said:
So I want to enjoy the speeds of SSD and move away from standard slow hard drives, but there is two things putting me off. Small drive size and drive decay.

I would get a few more hard drives and just RAID0 them, but I can only fit one HDD in case and I REALLY like my case. Not willing to replace it for any reason. I know USB3 isn't quite as fast as an SSD, but it's a hell of a lot faster than a regular hard drive, so I figured, why not stripe seven 128GB flash drives in Raid0? It's a shlep to get windows to boot from USB, but it's not impossible, done it before. I don't care about redundancy, just speed.

Is this a stupid idea?
Click to expand...
Get an SSHD drive
 
Arksun said:
Small drive size and drive decay.
Click to expand...

Keep an eye out on carbonite for enterprise ssds. I got a used (90 day power on) 960gb samsung sm863 for ~R3300, 5 Years/6,160 TBW. You can write a Terabyte every day for 16 years which is never gonna happen.
 
Sumen said:
Get an SSHD drive
Click to expand...

Why..? So he can get slightly faster speeds than a normal HDD but, slower than a SSD..?

The increased capacity on a SSHD drive vs the slight speed increase because of the small SSD cache, does not justify foregoing a SSD..
 
WAslayer said:
Why..? So he can get slightly faster speeds than a normal HDD but, slower than a SSD..?

The increased capacity on a SSHD drive vs the slight speed increase because of the small SSD cache, does not justify foregoing a SSD..
Click to expand...
Well, if you can't afford an ssd and want something that's not as slow as hdd then SSHD is a good compromise, which tests have shown.
 
Sumen said:
Well, if you can't afford an ssd and want something that's not as slow as hdd then SSHD is a good compromise, which tests have shown.
Click to expand...

Honestly, it is a waste of money.. Save your money for the SSD in the capacity you want and be happy..

I have a 1TB SSHD, guess where it is, in an anti-static bag doing nothing.. Tests say that they are a good compromise and the tests are not wrong but, it's real world performance that matters, of which I saw nothing when I used my SSHD for over 6 months as my main OS drive..

Before you ask, I got the drive for free.. No money spent on it..
 
I tried to do the RAID0 thing with USB memory sticks.

Not possible, but it's a good idea. Wonder if Linux will be able to use USB memory sticks as drives? Then you can get an USB hub, plug in a couple of sticks and set up a RAIDed array.
 
SSD for OS

Old HDD in external USB3 enclosure, stashed out the way. USB3 is faster than the HDD, so no bottleneck.

Could even plug the old HDD into your router if that's supported, depending on the speeds you need :)
 
Budza said:
SSD for OS

Old HDD in external USB3 enclosure, stashed out the way. USB3 is faster than the HDD, so no bottleneck.

Could even plug the old HDD into your router if that's supported, depending on the speeds you need :)
Click to expand...

what i did with my 9 year old laptop is replace main hdd with my old 60gb ssd. remove dvd rom and stash the original hdd the the space using just the pcb connected to thehdd without the actual enclosure and run the cable to the usb port. that way i didn't need to buy a hdd caddy (not that i could find one.) and got to use my old usb 2.0 ecloure that was gathering dust.
 
Just for **** and giggles I went ahead put the bunch of flash drives in raid0 to test the read/write speeds. It did turn out to be significantly faster than a regular HDD. But yea, software raid can't be booted from.
 
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