Upgrading storage...

[dorfma05]

Ok so I'm upgrading my storage in general on my main home computer.

I currently have a 300GB Velociraptor as my applications/os drive & (2) 1TB seagates for my storage.

I'm thinking of moving up to (2) 2TB WD Green Drives for storage but I'm not sure how I should do my os / applications drives.

I was looking at possibly going with an OCZ Vertex 2 for the OS and another for applications.

I guess my question is: Is it worth doing (2) separated physical drives for the OS & applications of should I just get one bigger/better drive?

I'm leaning towards one larger drive due to the way flash storage works (the way it works better with less space used). It seems that the access times would be minimally slower though compared to (2) separate drives (with 2 separate drives you could have the OS drive & application drive each accessing different data at the same time, which won't always occur anyways).

Any input is much appreciated.

 

[flamenko]

I might go for the bigger drive for both, although I don't believe you will see any performance difference whatsoever from ssd to ssd.

 

[FishAk]

Bigger drives generally have more channels, which makes them faster- like RAID 0

I don't think that's true for Sandforce drives. The small ones look like they perform as well as the big ones.

In any case, I don't see much, if any benefit, from putting OS and programs on separate SSDs. I don't know if you could perceive a difference by reading from two drives simultaneously.

 

[dorfma05]

Thanks for the input folks. One other thing I was wondering:

Is it really that important to have the OS on an SSD drive? Does that offer any advantage other than improving boot time?

I ask because I was thinking of keeping my WD Velociraptor (300GB) for my OS and just getting the SSD for applications. Would this be a bad idea?

 

[flamenko]

The whole idea behind solid state drives is to experience the visible improvement in your normal computer use, most of which is through the increased performance of your OS and applications. To have a SSD simply as a storage drive would be like putting the buggy before the horse because it will pick the info up very quickly and then draw it into the slowness of the hard drive system.

Boot time is just the tip of the ice berg. Imagine that your computer knows what you are going to do or, what button you are about to push, before you do. This is what it feels like. It all has to do with seek times. A hard drive takes about 9ms to find info whereas a ssd takes.1ms, 90 times less. As well, he info is grabbed in a pipe line with a ssd whereas, with a hd it is like a dump truck which has to return to fill and empty again. With the HD, each time it empties and has to go back, it is necessary to add on to the seek time once again.

Hope this helps!

 

[dorfma05]

The whole idea behind solid state drives is to experience the visible improvement in your normal computer use, most of which is through the increased performance of your OS and applications. To have a SSD simply as a storage drive would be like putting the buggy before the horse because it will pick the info up very quickly and then draw it into the slowness of the hard drive system.

Boot time is just the tip of the ice berg. Imagine that your computer knows what you are going to do or, what button you are about to push, before you do. This is what it feels like. It all has to do with seek times. A hard drive takes about 9ms to find info whereas a ssd takes.1ms, 90 times less. As well, he info is grabbed in a pipe line with a ssd whereas, with a hd it is like a dump truck which has to return to fill and empty again. With the HD, each time it empties and has to go back, it is necessary to add on to the seek time once again.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the input, very helpful.

I may be gearing this computer towards being a digital audio workstation in the near future. This involves very large sound banks that may not fit on a single SSD. What is the best way to combine these drives in an array? Is it worth doing a raid 0 setup? I'd do a JBOD setup but it seems like there is no advantage of doing that over a raid 0 setup.
I could back this drive up to a HDD and it would rarely change (only when I acquire new soundbanks) so I can deal with a potential failure.