Thoughts on SSHD RAID 0 with SSD Boot drive

[K4MiAZE]

im just about to upgrade my HD on my rig and i was hoping i could get some guidance. At the moment Im thinking of 2TB of SSHD in RAID 0 config and maybe 128 or 250 GB SSD boot drive ? im looking to play games and just overall faster performance as at the moment i feel that the hard drives i have are a serious bottleneck ... much appreciate a reply. thanks


fingers crossed i dont gotta splash out on pcie ssd :biggrin:

 

[mikeymikec]

You want to multiply the potential for catastrophic storage failure by at least four (count one for each half of each SSHD as I very much doubt that the device will work if either fails)?

IMO just do what I do, have a boot SSD that is large enough to store the games you are actively playing, have a HDD in the system for 'other data storage', uninstall games you're not actively playing or move/archive them onto the HDD.

Steam has a function to back up game content to another device, or if your Internet connection is fast enough then just delete the game and re-download it when the time comes that you want to play it again.

While you're correct that HDDs are a disk I/O bottleneck, RAID0 does not automatically double disk transfer speeds, even with an SSHD there are still data seek times to consider, the quality of the RAID driver, the amount of SSD flash available to use as cache, etc.

I'm sure that pairing two HDDs will yield some significant results, I personally would only do it if I had a very large job load of data that required significant crunching (large enough to make SSDs impractical costwise), and the RAID0 volume was only being used as a temporary storage system during the crunching process, then transferred to another device, as well as backups potentially performing before and after the process.

 

[Data-Medics]

Most games are actually optimized to minimize hard drive usage during game play. So other than load times you're unlikely to see much difference. Your bottleneck is most likely elsewhere (GPU or CPU).

Also putting two hard drives in a RAID 0 in a desktop doesn't actually make it much faster in the real world. Only benefit will be when moving large files. RAID 0 really isn't a good idea.

 

[thilanliyan]

After having a catastrophic RAID 0 failure a couple of years ago, I wouldn't do it again. Now I have my SSD OS drive, which I image every couple of weeks, and a storage drive which is backed up to two different locations.

 

[K4MiAZE]

Thanks very much for all of your opinions and info it is much appreciated and i have taking it all in ... i think i will go with a slighty bigger SSD Boot drive and an SSHD with a HDD to back them up ... as for other bottlenecks i have

AMD 6350fx (OC)
R9 280x (OC)
8GB 2100MHz(OC)
MSI 970 MB

so i have no idea what is holding me back what do u guys thing of these specs ,
should i go intel nivid overkill ?!
again replys are much appreciated
Thanks for you time

 

[Dasa2]

depends on the game and res you play

the cpu will make a lot of games drop under 60fps at times especially if the mb doesnt have good enough vrm for your oc
4690k is where you would upgrade to right now but skylake is getting closer so i would hold out for that

gpu is good for 1080p in most things but for higher res it will struggle in a fair few new games
if you were looking at a gpu upgrade i would be looking to gtx980ti 6g to be worthwhile

i find a ssd cache works really well im using a 64g ssd cache on a 3tb toshiba and i load into games at a similar speed to friends with ssd
but i dont like the idea of mixing it with raid0

 

[myocardia]

depends on the game and res you play

Very much so. Depending on the games you play, and assuming that you have a 1080P monitor (1920x1080 resolution), you're most likely only being held back by your CPU. This thread here shows how high or low of FPS you'll get with a lot of the current CPUs in GTAV, when you aren't being held back by the video card: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2428163