Raid0

[Arachnotronic]

Hi all,

I just picked up a couple of Crucial MX200 500GB drives. My intention is to use them in RAID0 for additional performance as general purpose OS/applications drives.

In benchmarks, I know that RAID0 brings substantial benefits, but will I notice a big difference in real-world usage?

Thanks.

 

[Childs]

No sort of fault tolerance would be the biggest thing. Just be sure to back up often.

 

[Berryracer]

I have a RAID 0 of 3 SSds as you can see in my sig and I just did it because I can......performance wise, as a user, I notice 0 difference between this RAID x 3 setup vs when I had a single SSD. If you want to play the benchmarks game, then sure, otherwise it won't make a single difference unless all you do all day is copy large 5GB + files where sequential writes matter. 4K speedwise they're very similar with RAID 0 having a bit higher latency VS a single SSD setup

 

[CiPHER]

I wrote a bunch about SSDs in RAID0 in this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2425370.

RAID0 will increase both sequential I/O and random I/O and will cut average latency in half, for all performance figures but one. It is used in a single SSD extensively already and throughout the rest of your computer.

But despite RAID0 being very good at its job, an even faster SSD will not give you much benefit at all. A single SSD is already very fast. It might be a fraction faster when starting games or installing updates, but that's about it. Don't blame RAID0 though, it does an amazing job which is why it is used to extensively throughout computing technology.

 

[Blain]

I just picked up a couple of Crucial MX200 500GB drives.
My intention is to use them in RAID0 for additional performance as general purpose OS/applications drives.

In benchmarks, I know that RAID0 brings substantial benefits, but will I notice a big difference in real-world usage?

Absolutely NOT

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Absolutely NOT

I think we're all on the same page with this.

A little qualitative analysis would help. SSDs should be more reliable than HDDs. RAID0 increases the risk that one failing HDD will lose the whole enchilada for you, and the logic applies to SSDs, but only in the context of the first idea about reliability.

In benchmarks, you can nearly double your sequential read and write speeds with RAID0. With HDDs, the difference may be analogous to comparing the speed of a bicycle to an auto, or a pitched baseball to the speed of certain aircraft.

With SSDs, it might be more like comparing the speed of an Alpha particle to a Photon.

Even so, I RAM-cache my SSDs either with RAPID or Primo-Cache. It's cheaper -- if benchmark scores mean anything. I would drop the practice in a New-York minute if it hadn't proven reliable: I won't compromise reliability for performance.

Overall, the economist in me sees "diminishing returns" to your SSD investment, unless your primary imperative is the quantity of storage. If the motivation for purchasing two SSDs is primarily one of speed, you're spending double or triple to achieve a comparable benchmark result, but the real-world performance improvement is barely noticeable.

PUt it another way, ignoring the possibility you have a "2-percenter's" budget as opposed to that of a "47-percenter." You can buy two SSDs of 500GB each for perhaps $200 each or a total of $400+. You can buy a 1TB SSD for something around $350.

I say -- buy the 1TB drive, do whatever else you can to improve "benchmark-able performance" and enjoy "universal AHCI wonderfulness."

 

[corkyg]

RAID0 with SSDs is more of a fad than beed, In a few words, the performance benefit is not really noticeable when doing work, but the risk to data is higher than using the SSDs singly. For me, reliability trumps benchies.

 

[CiPHER]

Modern SSDs are pretty reliable. Plus, SSDs don't have the bad sector issue that breaks so many RAID arrays. So we are left with the risk of SSD failure, which is very small.

If doubling this risk, will that change anything from your duty to create and maintain backups? If not, then the added 'risk' is merely an inconvenience of having to reinstall windows and restore from backup. Generally, the data on SSD is not important anyway, but holds the installation and installed games. The actual personal data like saved games and documents is rather small, and easily backed up even to a USB stick.

Without RAID, you still need to do all the above. Whether the risk is doubled or not, doesn't change all that much. So i'd argue that the additional risk of RAID0 doesn't change much in reality. You still need to create your backups, and if you need to reinstall every 2 years instead of every 4 years that is no big deal either.

Would you recommend a smaller SSD with less NAND chips, because it has a theoretically lower chance of failure?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Modern SSDs are pretty reliable. Plus, SSDs don't have the bad sector issue that breaks so many RAID arrays. So we are left with the risk of SSD failure, which is very small.

If doubling this risk, will that change anything from your duty to create and maintain backups? If not, then the added 'risk' is merely an inconvenience of having to reinstall windows and restore from backup. Generally, the data on SSD is not important anyway, but holds the installation and installed games. The actual personal data like saved games and documents is rather small, and easily backed up even to a USB stick.

Without RAID, you still need to do all the above. Whether the risk is doubled or not, doesn't change all that much. So i'd argue that the additional risk of RAID0 doesn't change much in reality. You still need to create your backups, and if you need to reinstall every 2 years instead of every 4 years that is no big deal either.

Would you recommend a smaller SSD with less NAND chips, because it has a theoretically lower chance of failure?

No disagreement there. I myself was only saying that risk is a minor factor, and the real-world performance difference for the expense would deter me from building a 2x RAID0 as opposed to a single AHCI-configured SSD of double the capacity.

I'm obviously going to use my existing backup strategies, and if I have selective redundancy on my server (which also backs up client boot-drives nightly), I wouldn't even need RAID1 on the client-workstation.

But it's "your money" and "your choice" -- no reference to _CIPHER_ in particular. Suppose you have your single SSD backed up? If the single SSD fails, your inconvenience will be no different than for replacing a failed drive in the array. But with the array, you're fiddling with two or more drives just for replacing one. Even that is insignificant -- perhaps.

But why complicate things unnecessarily? Again -- it's the OP's choice. Just not mine at this time -- having deployed RAID0's and RAID5's on a number of systems in the past.

JUST AN EPILOGUE: I'd think one would want to look at this issue -- to RAID or not to RAID -- from the viewpoint of the bottleneck which SSDs have considerably widened. How much more "benchmark performance" would change that bottleneck in terms of the overall hardware/storage pyramid model of computer systems? At this point, I think the difference may be a "last grain of rice," but it's not a very significant grain -- at the moment.

 

[Berryracer]

RAID0 with SSDs is more of a fad than beed, In a few words, the performance benefit is not really noticeable when doing work, but the risk to data is higher than using the SSDs singly. For me, reliability trumps benchies.

never had an SSD fail on me in the 5 years I've been using them. This "if one drive fails the whole array fails" is the silliest argument against RAID 0 really (no offense to you BTW). The chances of an SSD failing is like 0.05% unlike the unreliable HDDs which might fail any second, any movement, etc.

Still, I only RAID because I can, not saying I see any benefit in my workflow

Now, be it RAID, SSD, HDD, one should always backup. I do daily backups using SyncBack Pro and it only takes a few seconds to only mirror the differences between the source and destination drive.

RAId 0 has one advantage is that it overcomes the data limit bottleneck of SATA III as we know the limit has already been saturated by the lates and greatest SSDs like the 850 PRO and SanDisk Extreme so RAID is the solution to overcome that limit unless one has the option to jump onto the M2 / PCIe bandwagon which I can't in my laptop

 

[corkyg]

Good comments all. I simply prefer hardware redundancy for my laptop. I have two Sammy 830s (256GB) and they are duplicates. I rotate them every week or so. When I travel I always have a spare tire that can be replaced in less than a minute. So I don't worry about malware corruptions etc. I just swap drives and re-clone good to bad and the spare tire is recovered. Just personal preference. Over the years I have used RAID and my sense is that most failures are not the drive, but the RAID controller, firmware, and software. In my case, there is no tangible benefit.

It's like many things - a personal choice.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Thanks for the input, everybody. I'll just use them as two independent storage drives, then.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

never had an SSD fail on me in the 5 years I've been using them. This "if one drive fails the whole array fails" is the silliest argument against RAID 0 really (no offense to you BTW). The chances of an SSD failing is like 0.05% unlike the unreliable HDDs which might fail any second, any movement, etc.

Still, I only RAID because I can, not saying I see any benefit in my workflow

Now, be it RAID, SSD, HDD, one should always backup. I do daily backups using SyncBack Pro and it only takes a few seconds to only mirror the differences between the source and destination drive.

RAId 0 has one advantage is that it overcomes the data limit bottleneck of SATA III as we know the limit has already been saturated by the lates and greatest SSDs like the 850 PRO and SanDisk Extreme so RAID is the solution to overcome that limit unless one has the option to jump onto the M2 / PCIe bandwagon which I can't in my laptop

Like I'd already said, without assuming that your comment is a response to mine particularly -- there would be much less risk in RAID0 for the SSDs than for HDDs. To me, the cost-benefit issue is about bang for the buck.

Truth is -- I've had some five or six RAID0's and a RAID5. The only RAID0 that ever "went south" was that of my sister-in-law. I still suspect she started ****ing around with the controller BIOS settings and borked the array. But I didn't mention it, or stir the pot.

One HDD RAID0 has been running continuously for maybe 5 years 24/7.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thanks for the input, everybody. I'll just use them as two independent storage drives, then.

Just a thought -- and mindful that once respondents (like me as well) begin posting -- hot dialogues and digressions begin to clutter the thread.

You can do that -- too. If fiddling with drive letters becomes a nuisance, you could configure them as "JBOD" or spend $25 on something like StableBit DrivePool. According to Stablebit's tech-support, you should actually be able to cache the SSDs to RAM (with the right software), and it would only improve things with StableBit.

But they'd certainly be "great" as separate drives with drive letters and labels. Don't let me discourage you from a RAID0, though. There shouldn't be a problem now with TRIM implementation. But like I also said -- you might not notice the difference -- otherwise and anyway.

 

[hhhd1]

..
My intention is to use them in RAID0 for additional performance as general purpose OS/applications drives.

In benchmarks, I know that RAID0 brings substantial benefits, but will I notice a big difference in real-world usage?

I am too late to the party, but ..

The main benchmark result that affects general purpose OS/apps performance is 4k read, Queue depth of 1, and that does not improve much with RAID0.

IMO, RAID0 brings the hassles of RAID0 without any performance benefit.

There are other benefits, like having all the space in one partition.

Leaving the drives separate, allow you to move one of them to a second computer easily if it was ever needed.

 

[Berryracer]

Like I'd already said, without assuming that your comment is a response to mine particularly -- there would be much less risk in RAID0 for the SSDs than for HDDs. To me, the cost-benefit issue is about bang for the buck.

Truth is -- I've had some five or six RAID0's and a RAID5. The only RAID0 that ever "went south" was that of my sister-in-law. I still suspect she started ****ing around with the controller BIOS settings and borked the array. But I didn't mention it, or stir the pot.

One HDD RAID0 has been running continuously for maybe 5 years 24/7.

my response was for Mr. Corky

 

[Berryracer]

I am too late to the party, but ..

The main benchmark result that affects general purpose OS/apps performance is 4k read, Queue depth of 1, and that does not improve much with RAID0.

IMO, RAID0 brings the hassles of RAID0 without any performance benefit.

There are other benefits, like having all the space in one partition.

Leaving the drives separate, allow you to move one of them to a second computer easily if it was ever needed.

yes that's the main reason I do RAID, I put three 1 TB SSDs so I have almost 3TB of SSD space....200 GB for Windows and the D: partition for the remaining space where my videos, music, etc. goes

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I suppose my reticence about RAID0 these days is that there's no built-in redundancy, even if SSDs run perfectly for a million years.

And some of the perspectives shown in post-responses here make me more intent on maintaining and properly replacing my server. I wouldn't ever need 3 or 4TB of workstation storage, as long as the server . . . well . . . continues to "serve well." It also provides a more convenient layer of backup.

 

[guskline]

Just set up raid 0 with my 2 Samsung 850 EVO 550G ssds below. Really runs well.

 

[aigomorla]

well im in R0 not for speed but for the extended storage capacity...

as others said, you notice very little speed.
However you do almost effectively double the SSD space.

 

[Ketchup]

well im in R0 not for speed but for the extended storage capacity...

as others said, you notice very little speed.
However you do almost effectively double the SSD space.

There is definitely something to be said for the simplicity of one drive letter on a desktop/laptop.

Ideally, another device is handling backups for fault tolerance anyway, so don't let that aspect scare you away for the RAID idea.

 

[PliotronX]

The only caveats I would be at least mindful of are that TRIM support under RAID is not universal. If your controller does not support AHCI/TRIM functions in an array, a single SSD will always be faster than that array and the other being again some controllers will not allow you to check out SMART status however it is a lot less reliable as a predictive tool than it is for spinners so this is not as big of a deal.

The prospect of total loss of data is scary but yeah, as long as you have a safe backup go ahead and play with it because it actually works pretty well