Intel 40GB V's or OCZ 30gb Vertex in RAID?

[phprocks]

newegg has insane deals on both today. Which would be the better choice?

 

[Ionizer86]

newegg has insane deals on both today. Which would be the better choice?

Vertex 30GB for $80 isn't an insane deal. It's been $68 at TD with rebate/Bing. Likewise, $125 for X25-V 40GB isn't hot. A Kingston rebrand was sold for about $75 a few days ago - just needed a firmware update to support TRIM.

I'd say if you wait on it, you'll find better deals that are closer to, or possibly under, $2/GB.

 

[phprocks]

thats great thanks for answering my question.

 

[Elixer]

I thought some controllers don't support TRIM in RAID configs...you may want to check if yours does or not.

 

[Ionizer86]

Price is obviously a relevant part of the decision-making process. Just seeing to it that you don't get too excited over this rather expensive "sale" that they have today. No need for a hostile bump.

With that said, you'll want to consider your need for storage too. 60GB vs 80GB. Plus, SSD's tend to perform better when relatively empty.

Here's an article with good benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3618/intel-x25v-in-raid0-faster-than-x25m-g2-for-250/5

It shows the X25-V in RAID along with the X25-V as a stand-alone, and it also has the OCZ Vertex in stand-alone. Too bad it doesn't have the OCZ Vertex in RAID.

Keep in mind that you lose TRIM in RAID.

If I were looking to get SSD's in RAID, I'd try to see if a deal such as below would come back anytime soon:
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=308053&t=1942612

 

[Zap]

If I were looking to get SSD's in RAID, I'd try to see if a deal such as below would come back anytime soon:
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=308053&t=1942612

I doubt it, since these drives are EOL so they're not being made anymore.

With that being said, if the deal comes back, someone please post it here. :awe:

 

[poofyhairguy]

I chose to go with the OCZ 30gb in RAID. Why?

1. I contacted a support person on the OCZ forum and they assured me that on their drives with the newest firmware, garbage collection/Trim works in RAID.

2. I hackintosh so SSDs that do Trim are useless to me (OSX doesn't support Trim) as are drives that just do garbage collection in NTFS.

The OCZ drives to a file system agnostic garbage collection, so it works good in OSX or Linux. In fact, that is why OCZ is the only brand that has "Mac" version of SSDs, even thought the guy on the forum told me they were the EXACT same thing as the non-Mac versions at a higher price. Companies just can't help themselves from milking an extra margin out of Mac idiots who think that the Apple has to be on the box for stuff to work.


With all that said, the Intel drives are DEFINITELY faster on writes (even after RAID) and honestly an 80GB Intel drive probably beats both in a RAID due to the way SSDs work.