SSD's. Raid-0 or no?

[Emulex]

raid-0 with two ssd can give sata2 users much higher throughput for older systems too! Just remember ssd page sizes are 4K or 16KB so you want to interleave on an useable stripe size

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Every last one of those that you mentioned has methods in place to tolerate failure of a single sub-component without completely killing the component. All except a RAID-0 array anyway. And again, in a consumer setup, you're going to likely saturate your SATA interface with a single SSD, so what's the point of risking the entire data array and going RAID-0? Single drive failure kills the entire storage volume. SSDs fail a lot less often than they used to, but they still fail at times.

1. I don't know about other controllers, but Intel's can provide the bandwidth of just over 3x SATA6 SSDs in RAID0, saying that just 1 drive will do it is misleading, although I suppose maybe you mean a single drive can saturate a single SATA6 connection?

2. quality SSDs fail a lot less often than HDDs do, and I've run at at least one HDD RAID0 array since '04. Basically there's no need to be paranoid about losing data as long as you're backing up your data, the major difference is downtime. I can handle the potential downtime of rebuilding from a RAID0 failure and would thus rather not spend the extra money on RAID5 or better for for parity when I don't really need it outside of my NAS.

This, unless it's purely temporary storage. Basically, treat it like a very large ram pool.

Never use it for actual live data though, like a NAS. You can have all the backups in the world but if a drive fails you lose immediate access to all your data and you still need to rebuild the file system from backups. Things like permissions etc can be a royal pain too unless you find a way to back that up too and restore a verbatim copy of the entire FS.

I would use either raid 10 or raid 5. I have not played with raid with SSDs so can't speak from experience but I would imagine raid 5 or 6 is probably a viable option even for large arrays since the rebuild times should be pretty fast.

That said, it would be fun to mess around with raid 0 just to play around with it, but no way would I use it for anything short of a quick lab based test or for data I really don't care about losing access to.

I can't help but think you guys use your computers strictly for mission critical stuff and have zero tolerance for downtime.

while RAID5 or better with SSDs might seem trivial because of fast rebuild times, my opinion is why bother wasting that much expensive capacity (SSDs still not cheap) on parity for a consumer system when a single (and relatively inexpensive) HDD can back up an entire SSD RAID0 (even if its 3 or 4 drives), let alone a large NAS?

RAID on SSDs is pointless, gives you less 4K speeds which are the most important for OS snapiness, longer boot time due to the initialization of the RAID Controller on startup, and higher risk of data loss!

http://www.overclock.net/t/1500862/1-single-ssd-vs-2-ssd-raid-0


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I've used Samsung 850 PROs in RAID 0 mode, believe me there is 0 difference between RAID 0 and a single SSD when it comes to the performance that a normal user would experience because RAID 0 mode doesn't improve on the 4K random reads/writes which is what a normal or even power user would use most of the time, it only helps in sequential reads/writes, say for instance if all you do is copy large video or data files (10GB ++) all the time from one partition to the other which I doubt that you do....

RAID 0 mode is great to show off high benchmarks, but for a normal user, it only increases the risk of failure, higher latency, longer boot times due to the 2 - 3 seconds required for the RAID controller at startup, just not worth it, get the largest single SSD that you can afford and be done with it

Excerpts from the Samsung SSD Whitepaper

except that is precisely what I do...and thus is not pointless...

 

[npaladin-2000]

1. I don't know about other controllers, but Intel's can provide the bandwidth of just over 3x SATA6 SSDs in RAID0, saying that just 1 drive will do it is misleading, although I suppose maybe you mean a single drive can saturate a single SATA6 connection?

2. quality SSDs fail a lot less often than HDDs do, and I've run at at least one HDD RAID0 array since '04. Basically there's no need to be paranoid about losing data as long as you're backing up your data, the major difference is downtime. I can handle the potential downtime of rebuilding from a RAID0 failure and would thus rather not spend the extra money on RAID5 or better for for parity when I don't really need it outside of my NAS.



I can't help but think you guys use your computers strictly for mission critical stuff and have zero tolerance for downtime.

while RAID5 or better with SSDs might seem trivial because of fast rebuild times, my opinion is why bother wasting that much expensive capacity (SSDs still not cheap) on parity for a consumer system when a single (and relatively inexpensive) HDD can back up an entire SSD RAID0 (even if its 3 or 4 drives), let alone a large NAS?



except that is precisely what I do...and thus is not pointless...

Many of us use our machines for work and are therefore much less tolerant of downtime, yes.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Many of us use our machines for work and are therefore much less tolerant of downtime, yes.

many =! all

of course I'd even go as far as to wager that many if not most enthusiasts use their machines for play more than they do for work, and that if they do any serious work, many such users are also likely have more than one rig for segregating such purposes

this dogmatic stance against RAID0 is pretty asinine; telling me not to use RAID0 is akin to telling me not to overclock

 

[MrBusy]

For home desktop, no.

 

[npaladin-2000]

this dogmatic stance against RAID0 is pretty asinine; telling me not to use RAID0 is akin to telling me not to overclock

Which you also shouldn't do.

 

[Ajay]

Well, with only SATA 2 connectors, and the price of SSD's when I bought - RAID 0 worked out well for me - giving me SATA 3 performance at the cost of a longer boot times.

I do full backups of my storage devices to a network connected server.

If I were buying now, I'd just go with 1 SSD (or wait for M2x4 to come down in price).