Fault Tolerance of 4 SSDs in RAID-0...

[Baasha]

I am planning to get the new 3rd generation SSDs (possibly Intel) when they are released for my main OS drive.

I want to use 4 of them in RAID-0.

I currently have 2 SLC SSDs in RAID-0 as my OS drive but for whatever reason, it doesn't seem all that fast. Even my Windows Experience Index score for HDDs is only 6.8!

Does anyone here have 4 SSDs in RAID-0? If so, how is the performance? How is the fault tolerance? Have you had your data corrupted because of the RAID-0 set up? Have you had to reinstall your OS because of it (assuming you use this as your OS drive)?

I have had my system since May 2009 and the SSDs have worked very well! Two of them in RAID-0 have given me ZERO issues. The only gripe is that I wish I had gotten two more so that my OS drive would have some depth but they are only 64GB together so I have only 20GB available now.

What are your suggestions on using 4 drives, especially SSDs, for a RAID-0 set up as an OS drive?

 

[deimos3428]

I bought a 3x60GB (Sandforce) RAID 0 setup last month.

Honestly, it seems like a bit of a waste as I don't have anything that can write that fast, at least for an extended period of time. If I were to do it again I'd go with a 2x90GB or similar. I'm considering rebuilding it as 3x60GB RAID5 instead. I'll lose some space but fault tolerance is nice.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Have benchmarked 4 C300 256GB SSD's in RAID0 on an Intel ICH10R. After 2 the performance improvements are miniscule at best. Even just using 2 in RAID0 doesn't really show performance improvements enough to justify the trouble. Now maybe with a better RAID controller things might be different, but on SATA2 and Intel's controller, it's not worth the effort with fast SSD's.In all actuality, in terms of boot up speed, it's slower since you spend more time waiting to initialize the drives.

Fault tolerance is the same as when using regular hard drives...

 

[Emulex]

raid-0 is actually more stable than raid-1/5 on ich because it doesn't really go looking for errors. until something whacky happens like a drive doesn't power up (ahem sandforce) then it will break the raid. but i've rocked raid-0 on maxtor (lol) 7200's for years and they never had problems. i've also had brand new 750gb raid-1 fail in a day

 

[masteryoda34]

Running Win7 on two Intel 80GB G2 SDD in RAID0. Very fast and stable. I get sequential reads in the 400-500MB/s range with two. I would bet that with three or more in RAID0, the southbridge bandwidth would start to become the limiting factor.

 

[deimos3428]

Fault tolerance is the same as when using regular hard drives...

You bring up a good point which I completely missed it when the OP said it.

Fault tolerance is the ability of the array to survive disk failure. So you're right, single disk and RAID0 have the same fault tolerance: none. If a disk fails your data is gone. RAID1/5 are fault tolerant solutions; the data is recoverable on disk failure. (RAID1 is still operational, RAID5 may or may not be depending on configuration of hot spares.)

What the OP meant to ask about was the failure rate, which is a function of the number of disks and their MTBF. The more disks you add, the higher the failure rate of the storage solution. I suspect SSDs fail less often than HDDs, though.

 

[Old Hippie]

I bought an LSI 9240-4i for occasions like yours.

The one I linked comes with the fanout cable.

 

[Arsynic]

I am planning to get the new 3rd generation SSDs (possibly Intel) when they are released for my main OS drive.

I want to use 4 of them in RAID-0.

I currently have 2 SLC SSDs in RAID-0 as my OS drive but for whatever reason, it doesn't seem all that fast. Even my Windows Experience Index score for HDDs is only 6.8!

Does anyone here have 4 SSDs in RAID-0? If so, how is the performance? How is the fault tolerance? Have you had your data corrupted because of the RAID-0 set up? Have you had to reinstall your OS because of it (assuming you use this as your OS drive)?

I have had my system since May 2009 and the SSDs have worked very well! Two of them in RAID-0 have given me ZERO issues. The only gripe is that I wish I had gotten two more so that my OS drive would have some depth but they are only 64GB together so I have only 20GB available now.

What are your suggestions on using 4 drives, especially SSDs, for a RAID-0 set up as an OS drive?

The "0" in RAID 0 means 0 fault tolerance. One drive failure will tank your whole array. And don't get me started on the junk RAID (software) included with most desktop motherboards.