What's the most reliable 512GB SSD for ~$300?

[AdamK47]

I'm looking to get 6 of them to run in RAID-0.

 

[TemjinGold]

You just missed the Vertex 4 deal for $299. There's no other 512gb SSD at that price period.

 

[Coup27]

I've just had a good look around and closest I got to $300 was an m4. May I ask why you need ~3TB of SSD fast storage?

 

[Chapbass]

Man, 6 in raid 0....risky risky... Better hope you have good backups for 3TB of data...

 

[videoclone]

Man, 6 in raid 0....risky risky... Better hope you have good backups for 3TB of data...

LOL .. Yeah very risky indeed... Crucial M4 512GB would be a good option or Samsung 830 512GB, Sandisk 480GB is my other choice...

I think so long as he has a good stable 80% Gold rated clean power supply good cooling and Trim support for raid-0 he may be ok but backups are always a must even on a single reliable drive.

You may want to read this bit of info from anandtech
Intel to Add TRIM Support for RAID 0
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5136/intel-to-add-trim-support-for-raid-0

 

[KentState]

Your chances of a reliable setup with 6 drives in RAID 0 is very small IMO. The performance hit in RAID 5 would be very small. At that point, you could risk one the cheaper 500GB drives.

 

[AdamK47]

I've just had a good look around and closest I got to $300 was an m4. May I ask why you need ~3TB of SSD fast storage?

Games... many many of them.

The drives will be on an LSI 2308 controller built into the ASRock Extreme11 motherboard.

 

[AdamK47]

Just saw the reviews of the Vector drives. Now I'm wondering if I should hold off on getting six drives until I find some good deals on the 512GB Vectors.

 

[blackened23]

The vector and 840 pro are the fastest, but definitely not the cheapest....they won't be 300$ anytime soon IMO..

You should check out the intel 520 480GB - its priced around 360$ on amazon which isn't too bad. I can't find any 480/512 gig drives for 300$, aside from the vertex 4 which was on sale a few days back.

I'm also in your position and I settled on getting 2x intel 520 480GB drives.

 

[Insomniator]

Still not understanding why you need 3TB for games... or SSD's at all.

Why have so many games installed at once?

Raid 0 with 6 SSD's has to be the worst way of spending 2 grand on storage.

 

[KentState]

Still not understanding why you need 3TB for games... or SSD's at all.

Why have so many games installed at once?

Raid 0 with 6 SSD's has to be the worst way of spending 2 grand on storage.

That's why I suggest doing at least RAID 5. You get the read benefit since that's typically what happens once a game is installed. At least there it would be pretty quick to recover if a disk was lost and you don't have to start over.

 

[lehtv]

Still not understanding why you need 3TB for games... or SSD's at all.

Yeah me neither. I've only ever had about 200GB of games installed at the same time, and game loading times are mostly fine even on a 5400RPM hard disk... And I'd say I'm pretty hardcore... 3TB of SSD's? Seriously? Is there really no better way to spend money?

 

[Jman13]

The difference in loading times in most games is a few seconds. Performance in the games won't matter at all. Is it really worth $2,000 to have ALL your games load a little bit faster?

 

[TemjinGold]

If the OP is asking, obviously the answer is yes.

 

[blackened23]

Yeah me neither. I've only ever had about 200GB of games installed at the same time, and game loading times are mostly fine even on a 5400RPM hard disk... And I'd say I'm pretty hardcore... 3TB of SSD's? Seriously? Is there really no better way to spend money?

If you have money to burn on a hobby, why not? AdamK has 3 7970s and a SB-E. 3 SSDs would be great

 

[AdamK47]

Yeah me neither. I've only ever had about 200GB of games installed at the same time, and game loading times are mostly fine even on a 5400RPM hard disk... And I'd say I'm pretty hardcore... 3TB of SSD's? Seriously? Is there really no better way to spend money?

850 games installed

I'm not the only one on here thinking of setting up a crazy array of SSDs on an Extreme11. Someone on here has already done it.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2262558

I have the ASRock Extreme11 ordered along with 32GB of G.SKILL Ripjaws Z DDR3 2400. Should be here before this weekend. I'll play around with it for a bit and then decide on what SSDs to get. The integrated LSI controller has a max of 4GBps which is far higher than Intel's SATA3 controller.

Here's the AnandTech review results of the LSI controller:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6228/...-pcie-30-x16x16x16x16-and-lsi-8way-sassata/10

 

[Puffnstuff]

If the op has the cash and wants to do this then i say go for it.

 

[AdamK47]

Newegg must have been busy on Cyber Monday. It took them three days to package my order. At least I got $100 off on the ASRock Extreme11. The six 512GB (3TB array) is looking like a 99% probability at this point. I just need to determine what drives to get. I'm not worried about losing anything if something happens to the array. I'll be keeping the 4TB Deskstar 7K4000 for regular backups.

 

[RaistlinZ]

It seems like the Vector and 840 Pro are still limited by the Sata III interface.

 

[Anteaus]

Considering lack of trim with raid 0, wouldn't 6 of them cause the performace degradation to happen 6 times faster? He didn't mention if he had one of the newer chipsets that supports trim in raid 0 so this is more of a curiosity for me.

 

[AdamK47]

Are people still hung up a TRIM for SSD RAID arrays? TRIM is not supported with LSI RAID controllers. It really doesn't matter. There's garbage collection and I won't be doing very many writes since the array will be for storage with most activity being reading. The results I've seen show RAID-0 arrays on the ASRock Extrme11's LSI controller recovering quickly from heavy benchmarking.

 

[serpretetsky]

I wonder if you would see much performance different in raid-0, or if for reliability sake it would be better to just keep the 6 drives separate and install games individually on separate drives (so that one failure doesn't cause you to lose everything).

edit: hard drives i would consider (i dont think any of them meet your price requirements though)

samsung 830
samsung 840 /840 pro
crucial m4
corsair neutron
plextor m5
ocz vector

 

[DominionSeraph]

Just get a FusionIO ioDrive Octal.

 

[AdamK47]

Just get a FusionIO ioDrive Octal.

I'd love to, but it's about $98,000 out of my budget.

 

[Mfusick]

PCI card for your OS ?