Which is faster: A single SSD drive or 2 SATA drives in RAID?

thatsright

Diamond Member
May 1, 2001
3,004
3
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So which would be faster?

Building a new system and I'd like buy a Intel X25-M G2 80GB drive for almost $300 with a top speed of 200MB per sec. OR I could get two Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb drives and run them in RAID Striping. This would cost me about $150. I will be setting the RAID up on my new X58 based motherboard with Intel ICH10R controller.

Which setup would be faster do you think? For half the price of SSD I will get 13x the storage. If possible I'd rather have MEGA storage and decent speed over Mega speed and high cost. I do not do ANY GAMING!! I use photoshop mostly, so read speed is the most important.
 

PUN

Golden Member
Dec 5, 1999
1,590
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81
So which would be faster?

Building a new system and I'd like buy a Intel X25-M G2 80GB drive for almost $300 with a top speed of 200MB per sec. OR I could get two Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb drives and run them in RAID Striping. This would cost me about $150. I will be setting the RAID up on my new X58 based motherboard with Intel ICH10R controller.

Which setup would be faster do you think? For half the price of SSD I will get 13x the storage. If possible I'd rather have MEGA storage and decent speed over Mega speed and high cost. I do not do ANY GAMING!! I use photoshop mostly, so read speed is the most important.

what do you normally do with your PC?
If just internet, word/exel, photo editing, encoding/decoding.... stick with RAID WD Black. Photoshop loads little faster with SSD but once it's up and running, you won't notice any difference between the two.
 

thatsright

Diamond Member
May 1, 2001
3,004
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what do you normally do with your PC?
If just internet, word/exel, photo editing, encoding/decoding.... stick with RAID WD Black. Photoshop loads little faster with SSD but once it's up and running, you won't notice any difference between the two.

I'd say 60% Photoshop (with my P4 2.4Gz is very sluggish), 30% Internet and 10% Music and Videos. Because of Photoshop, read capability must be high.

One detriment to RAID, is its a PITA to setup.
 

Rubycon

Madame President
Aug 10, 2005
17,768
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Apples to oranges. A single SSD is faster than four of the fastest mechanical drives in RAID0. A bucket load of mechanical drives can exceed the STR of a single SSD however random access will still be far better on the SSD.

The only reason to stripe mechanicals is if you NEED a certain R/W speed on a continuous basis. It's pointless in a desktop for the OS especially considering that you can get 2TB single drives now!
 

bunnyfubbles

Lifer
Sep 3, 2001
12,248
3
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SSDs trash disc drives in random access

If you were to get only two HDDs, I wouldn't even stripe them because its better to have them separate so that you can independently read from or write to the drives at the same time without degradation of performance.
 

skid00skid00

Member
Oct 12, 2009
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My RAW conversions, and running actions in PS CS4, are only a tiny bit faster. Bridge building the catalog, or loading it anew each day, is much faster.
 

thatsright

Diamond Member
May 1, 2001
3,004
3
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My RAW conversions, and running actions in PS CS4, are only a tiny bit faster. Bridge building the catalog, or loading it anew each day, is much faster.


Do you mean faster with a SSD drive or RAID? How big are your biggest files worked on in PSP?
 

thatsright

Diamond Member
May 1, 2001
3,004
3
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Ok guys, give the thumbs up or down on this one....

The more I think about it, I think it may be a better idea to go with two drives (Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb) in RAID 1 Mirroring. This solves few issues:

1. Cost. I will save about $75 or so over the Intel SSD after buying 2 caviar drives.
2. Capacity: 1 TB of effective capacity is a hell of a lot better than 80GB.
3. All I care about is read performance for opening Photoshop and starting Windows 7 64-Bit. While I'm sure it would be fastest with a SSD, is that difference worth the price and significantly reduced storage capacity?
4. RAID 1 increases read performance
5. Redundancy. It would suck if a drive died and took 6 months of my pictures with it!!

What do you guys think? Does this sound right?

One last question:
-After I set these two drives in RAID, I would like to use a PATA ATA100 200GB drive I have and put the O/S page file and Photoshop Scratch disk there. Will this help/hurt performance?
 
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jimhsu

Senior member
Mar 22, 2009
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"Faster" is an ambiguous term. Do you mean bandwidth or latency?

I posted this on another thread about game performance, and some people found it useful:

For some math:

Avg mechanical disk seek = 15ms
Avg SSD read seek = 0.1 ms
HDD sequential read speed = 100MB/s
SSD sequential read speed = 200MB/s
We'll assume 3 bytes/pixel (uncompressed)

Typical wow texture size: 256x256x3 = 196KB
Typical "modern game" texture size: 1024x1024x3 = 3.1MB * 3(diffuse, normals, glow) = 9.4MB. The diffuse, normal map, and glow map are typically contiguous in the packed file, so random access is insignificant here.

An SSD fetches a wow texture in 0.1 + (196KB/200MB/s) = 0.1 + 0.98 = 1.08 ms
A hard disk does it in 15 + (196KB/100MB/s) = 16.96 ms. Notice that even with a huge RAID 0 array you can't get this below 15 ms.

Performance advantage = 15.7x

For the modern game texture, an SSD does it in 9.1MB/200MB/s + 0.1 = 45.6 ms
The hard disk does it in 9.1MB/100MB/s + 15 ms = 106 ms. The SSD lead here is not so impressive anymore. With a 2 disk RAID 0 array, this becomes 60.5 ms. With enough cheap disks, we can easily beat the SSD in cost.

Performance advantage = 2.32x

This all goes back to the latency vs bandwidth argument. Here's a really old but decent review on that:
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html

For perspective, accessing data via ethernet on a remote computer with SSD (0.3+0.1 ms) is many times faster than accessing data locally via a standard hard drive.
 

jimhsu

Senior member
Mar 22, 2009
705
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76
Ok guys, give the thumbs up or down on this one....

The more I think about it, I think it may be a better idea to go with two drives (Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb) in RAID 1 Mirroring. This solves few issues:

1. Cost. I will save about $75 or so over the Intel SSD after buying 2 caviar drives.
2. Capacity: 1 TB of effective capacity is a hell of a lot better than 80GB.
3. All I care about is read performance for opening Photoshop and starting Windows 7 64-Bit. While I'm sure it would be fastest with a SSD, is that difference worth the price and significantly reduced storage capacity?
4. RAID 1 increases read performance
5. Redundancy. It would suck if a drive died and took 6 months of my pictures with it!!

What do you guys think? Does this sound right?

One last question:
-After I set these two drives in RAID, I would like to use a PATA ATA100 200GB drive I have and put the O/S page file and Photoshop Scratch disk there. Will this help/hurt performance?

In response to your list:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. If you spend time in front of the computer like most people do and have a job, you'll find the difference is certainly worth the price. It IS that much faster.
4. Depends on the controller. "Stupid" controllers like the one on most motherboards don't. Certain smart ones that load balance (i.e expensive controller cards) will. A good read: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=150176
5. Yes, but: a) RAID does not protect against software failures (partition gone, virus, etc) which are more common than you think, and b) a single SSD has far less failure modes than 2 hard drives and a controller/motherboard. In any case, RAID is not a backup!
 
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DominionSeraph

Diamond Member
Jul 22, 2009
8,386
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Just a heads-up after browsing the Hot Deals forum -- TigerDirect has 12.8% Bing Cashback and its Intel SSD's are considerably cheaper than Newegg. (Something like $80 cheaper for the 80GB after cashback, and $130 cheaper for the 160GB version)
 

DBissett

Senior member
Sep 29, 2000
240
1
81
Ok guys, give the thumbs up or down on this one....

The more I think about it, I think it may be a better idea to go with two drives (Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb) in RAID 1 Mirroring. This solves few issues:

1. Cost. I will save about $75 or so over the Intel SSD after buying 2 caviar drives.
2. Capacity: 1 TB of effective capacity is a hell of a lot better than 80GB.
3. All I care about is read performance for opening Photoshop and starting Windows 7 64-Bit. While I'm sure it would be fastest with a SSD, is that difference worth the price and significantly reduced storage capacity?
4. RAID 1 increases read performance
5. Redundancy. It would suck if a drive died and took 6 months of my pictures with it!!

What do you guys think? Does this sound right?

One last question:
-After I set these two drives in RAID, I would like to use a PATA ATA100 200GB drive I have and put the O/S page file and Photoshop Scratch disk there. Will this help/hurt performance?

I hate to rain on your plan, but after setting up RAID1 on the machine in my sig a year ago I had nothing but problems. I used 2 WD AAKS640's, and found that whenever the machine required rebooting after a crash/lockup it would go into a "verify RAID" routine or something that would take hours before the machine was up to speed again. It was usable but barely so during this time because it slowed to a crawl. I also couldn't ever get my OCZ 1066 RAM to run at full speed, and had a weird problem with not getting any video signal sometime when I would first power up. All this time I was doing external backups too. So after fighting these hiccups for almost a year I ditched the RAID1 when I installed Win7 last month and have had NONE of the problems since then. If your primary concern is protecting against data loss just use your second HD for external backups. It will be much simpler and problem free in the long run. And as someone else already said, RAID1 is not a backup solution anyway. (My experience could have been due to something flaky about my MB or the onboard RAID, but others advised me that RAID1 was more trouble than it was worth when I started and this turned out to be true.)
 

rivan

Diamond Member
Jul 8, 2003
9,677
3
81
Only one comment: DO NOT put your scratch disk on a slower drive. The OS on a slower drive is a startup hit but not terrible afterward (especially if it's a dedicated drive). The scratch disk on a slower drive means that as soon as you're out of RAM, you're depending on a slow drive to handle the overflow. No biggie if you're never out of RAM; terrible if you sometimes are.
 

Voo

Golden Member
Feb 27, 2009
1,684
0
76
If your primary concern is protecting against data loss just use your second HD for external backups.
I'm not sure where so many people got the idea that a RAID is a form of backup, but that's a dangerous line of thought.

Raid1 and onwards may protect you against data loss if one of your drives has a mechanical failure, but you're screwed if something corrupts your data.

Other than that, I'm not sure what you did (crashes/lockups on a working machine aren't tolerable in either case and it's not that surprising that the Raid will have to find the corrupt data and what not), I haven't had any problems with my RAID1..
 

thatsright

Diamond Member
May 1, 2001
3,004
3
81
Well this is disappointing. From all of your suggestions above, it seems that I should reconsider and go back to my original idea of a SSD drive with Win7 and PSP installed. Then get a WD Caviar Black HD for data storage and PSP scratch disk?

I'm willing to spend the money to do the above, but coming from a single ATA 100 HD with XP and Adobe PSP CS3 installed on it, will I notice such a huge difference? One question:

1. I know my PATA drive does about 40MB per sec read, as I have tested it. How fast (in MB per sec) would two Caviar Black HD’s in RAID 1 Mirroring be, when reading data on a X58 ICH10R based motherboard? Once I know this, then I could get an idea of how much faster this setup would be over what I have now. If it is much, much better then I may not need to go the SSD route (at least this time).
 

Voo

Golden Member
Feb 27, 2009
1,684
0
76
Well this is disappointing. From all of your suggestions above, it seems that I should reconsider and go back to my original idea of a SSD drive with Win7 and PSP installed. Then get a WD Caviar Black HD for data storage and PSP scratch disk?
I would agree with everything but the last sentence - the scratch disk should be on the SSD, after all scratch disks are just used as virtual memory (no idea why Adobe wanted to implement this themselves.. it's not as if the OS wouldn't have that already)
 

DBissett

Senior member
Sep 29, 2000
240
1
81
Well this is disappointing. From all of your suggestions above, it seems that I should reconsider and go back to my original idea of a SSD drive with Win7 and PSP installed. Then get a WD Caviar Black HD for data storage and PSP scratch disk?

I'm willing to spend the money to do the above, but coming from a single ATA 100 HD with XP and Adobe PSP CS3 installed on it, will I notice such a huge difference? One question:

1. I know my PATA drive does about 40MB per sec read, as I have tested it. How fast (in MB per sec) would two Caviar Black HD’s in RAID 1 Mirroring be, when reading data on a X58 ICH10R based motherboard? Once I know this, then I could get an idea of how much faster this setup would be over what I have now. If it is much, much better then I may not need to go the SSD route (at least this time).

You would probably not notice any speed difference using RAID1, which is for data redundancy and not speed. RAID0 would offer some speed advantage but does not provide for data redundancy. And SSD would still be considerably faster. Just look at the read/write times on the SSD drives that have been tested here or listed for sale at the Egg. They test out considerably faster than Velocirapters, which are faster than the WD Black's you mention. The plan you're on now, SSD + HHD, is a good one, and just stick your old HHD, or a new one, in an external case for backups.
 

mikek753

Senior member
Dec 21, 2005
358
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0
how about you buy both SSD for OS and PSP and HDD to backup your work?
keep in mind you have to back up your work anyway.
HDD could be external
RAID will not help you with corrupted data!!! incremental backup will.
it's all about your priorities.
 

pyjujiop

Senior member
Mar 17, 2001
243
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76
I agree with the last post. If you're wanting to go with the SSD, go ahead and get it, and use it for Windows and PhotoShop, and use an ordinary hard drive to back up your data.
 

jimhsu

Senior member
Mar 22, 2009
705
0
76
Your backup should typically be

1. Local - 2nd hard drive on computer and/or (portable) external hard drive
2. Offsite - friend's or parent's house. If that is inconvenient, then try something like Mozy or Backblaze (I now have approx. 350 gigs at backblaze incidentially).

Motherboard RAID is typically minimally functional in terms of performance. RAID 5/6 especially on a motherboard is horrid, from what I hear.
 
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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
9,759
1
71
X25-M is faster than two 7200.10 in raid-0 (320gb)

access time is extremely high for raid due to overhead so ATTO benchmarks don't speak all.