cosrocket Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro and a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO. I can't return the 850 EVO as it is past the return date. So I was wondering what is the best way to use these 2 SSD's in one PC. Can 2 different SSD sizes and models be used in a RAID 0 configuration, or do they have to be exactly the same model and capacity? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mouettus Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 I've heard that SSD's in raid don't offer much in term of perceivable gains. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sikh Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro and a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO. I can't return the 850 EVO as it is past the return date. So I was wondering what is the best way to use these 2 SSD's in one PC. Can 2 different SSD sizes and models be used in a RAID 0 configuration, or do they have to be exactly the same model and capacity? For a raid 0, you need the same size because its stripping the data across both drives. I would recommend you use the 120 as a boot drive and the 250 as really fast storage. I have a 120 as my boot and a 250gb as my really fast gaming ssd. I put all of the games i play regularly / would like to be instant on there. neo1911 and xendrome 2 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xendrome Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 I've heard that SSD's in raid don't offer much in term of perceivable gains. Hmm in a stripe my performance doubles... from about 500MB/s to 1000MB/s so I'd disagree. offroadaaron, Open Minded, fusi0n and 1 other 4 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted March 13, 2015 Global Moderator Share Posted March 13, 2015 yeah i'd also use the 250GB drive for games or any applications that might have a huge load time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mouettus Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 Hmm in a stripe my performance doubles... from about 500MB/s to 1000MB/s so I'd disagree. Benchmark or real world? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lant Posted March 13, 2015 Share Posted March 13, 2015 I use one for the OS and the other to hold software dev projects. The SSD can help improve the build times in big C++ projects. Perhaps if you have disk IO intensive workloads you might shift them to your extra SSD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Warwagon MVC Posted March 13, 2015 MVC Share Posted March 13, 2015 Hmm in a stripe my performance doubles... from about 500MB/s to 1000MB/s so I'd disagree. For transferring large files maybe, but after that you are only gaining milliseconds for app launches and stuff. You can't get much faster than blink. Biohead 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian M. Veteran Posted March 13, 2015 Veteran Share Posted March 13, 2015 Benchmark or real world? Really depends on your usage. If you're just using it for the odd game, or for browsing the net - it'll have 0 noticeable difference. If you're doing anything which requires heavy reading/writing to disk, it makes a huge difference. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patseguin Global Moderator Posted March 14, 2015 Global Moderator Share Posted March 14, 2015 Performance was actually worse for me when I tried my SSD's in RAID 0. Also they didn't support TRIM in RAID. President Devil 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 Just plug em in and use them as you would a normal hard drive. It isn't rocket science. Pam14160 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jockulation Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 yeah i'd also use the 250GB drive for games or any applications that might have a huge load time. I did it the other way round.. 250GB for OS and 120GB as a games drive. In hindsight, it should really have been the other way around. Either way. Separate OS and games drive! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mando Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 I would be careful using ssds in raid. Windows sees them as scsi drives so defrag etc is enabled n trim aint sipported. I have 3 ssds (AHCI) in my games rig. 60Gb ocz vertex 3 for windows, 120gb evo 4 for steam and another evo 120gb for origin n apps. install samsung driver magician and you can double the r/w speeds of one evo bu caching in 1gb of ram Load times on games is seriously rapid and no sata controller bottlenecks Downside of z68 based board only 2 of the 4 sata 3 ports support ahci so my windows vertez is stuck on sata 2. R/w on vertex is 175mb r/ws compared to 500 on the evos on sata3. Plenty fast enough for windows. I dont have any tradional platter drives or user data/media, thats all kept on my nas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n_K Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 Hmm in a stripe my performance doubles... from about 500MB/s to 1000MB/s so I'd disagree. RAID 0 wouldn't double your speed, you have extra software/hardware/cpu overheads so right away we know this to be rubbish. You'd need a decent hardware RAID card to improve speed but it will not double. Not to mention the huge number of tests that have been done that show RAID 0 SSD slows your system down due to contention, you can't just write 16MB to one drive which is where you get the speed from, you have to write 1MB to one drive then check it, 1MB to the other drive then check it, etc. until you've written 8MB to both drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xendrome Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 RAID 0 wouldn't double your speed, you have extra software/hardware/cpu overheads so right away we know this to be rubbish. You'd need a decent hardware RAID card to improve speed but it will not double. Not to mention the huge number of tests that have been done that show RAID 0 SSD slows your system down due to contention, you can't just write 16MB to one drive which is where you get the speed from, you have to write 1MB to one drive then check it, 1MB to the other drive then check it, etc. until you've written 8MB to both drives. Perhaps you are confused with RAID 1? I dunno but that's a month or so old, and is it about 90% double the speed of having 1 drive Windows loads in about 14 seconds on one drive, and about 6 seconds on both drives. Edit: The above image is my system, specs in my sig. Here is an image from a website of a single 250GB 840 EVO source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-840-evo-review-1tb-ssd,3567-14.html Uhh so yeah, basically double on everything except 4K, which is expected... so hardly "rubbish" as you say. Stokkolm 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stokkolm Posted March 15, 2015 Share Posted March 15, 2015 Gotta agree with xenodrome, it's at lot faster in a raid 0 configuration. And trim is definitely supported by Windows for SSD's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Som Posted March 15, 2015 Share Posted March 15, 2015 Personally I use one for windows & one for documents and pictures etc, or you could us one for games Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Fahim S. MVC Posted March 15, 2015 MVC Share Posted March 15, 2015 Ignoring performance gains, running these two in RAID0 will mean you lose 130GB on the 250GB, effective increasing the price per GB, and losing 33% of the potential space you have. I personally wouldn't do that. When I ran a similar configuration (in terms of drive sizes), I ran a 128GB Crucial M4 as my OS/applications drive and a 256GB Samsung 830 as my data drive. If I had two drives of the same size, I would consider RAID0 and logical partitions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squuiid Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 running these two in RAID0 will mean you lose 130GB on the 250GB, effective increasing the price per GB, and losing 33% of the potential space you have. I personally wouldn't do that. Nonsense. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raid0 Posted March 19, 2015 Share Posted March 19, 2015 So I have 3 PCs and they are all on SSD, to show why Raid 0 is worth it guess which one is the Raid 0. One thing to mention, this is not the fastest SSD on the market, I bought the 1st one 1 year ago and second weeks ago, I didn't want to buy for 700$ of new SSD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToneKnee Posted March 20, 2015 Share Posted March 20, 2015 There is some misinformation about RAID and TRIM. Most if not all modern SSD drives now support TRIM which is used by Windows natively. Unfortunately, if you plan on using RAID-0, TRIM will only work if you use a chipset that can use it within a RAID array. Some of the newer Intel chipsets for example can do this while a lot of older (not just Intel) don't. Also, while there will be a noticeable increase in benchmark results in having RAID-0, you won't really notice it with game loading and other things not to mention you'll lose around ~120GB of space in the process. As others have suggested. I would use the 120GB drive for Windows, Programs etc and use the 256GB drive for your games. RAID-0 isn't worth it if you are going to lose 120GB of space for a performance boost that you may not even notice outside of benchmarks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mando Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro and a 120GB Samsung 850 EVO. I can't return the 850 EVO as it is past the return date. So I was wondering what is the best way to use these 2 SSD's in one PC. Can 2 different SSD sizes and models be used in a RAID 0 configuration, or do they have to be exactly the same model and capacity? I have 3 installed in AHCI mode without any traditional platter drives, id never go back. out of the 6 windows systems here, only 1 is left with a platter drive, everything else has some model of SSD now. (crucial M4, OCZ Vertex III)fitting an SSD to our laptops has been the best benefit, with extended battery life and better usability in windows. Ideally they both should be the same model and capacity, but it is possible , the volume will just be the smaller capacity, wasting the remainder on the larger drive in the set. however if you opt for RAID0 JBOD then im not 100% sure, I think youll get the combined capcity. With the R/Ws on SATA3 SSDs RAID will give you almost double speeds but, tbh, you can do the same using Samsung driver magician, I have it doing perf mode on my single SSD window drive and it uses up to 2gb of my sys ram as a cache for the selected single SSD producing RAID SSD like R/W speeds (800-1Gb s R/Ws). that way doing separate disks in AHCI each disk is using its own controller (not a bottleneck) independently. I would advise against putting SSDs in RAID in general on Z68 or older intel chipsets, my windows sees them as SCSI HDDs when set up in RAID and defrag etc is still enabled (trim also may be disabled) best way to use SSDs is in AHCI only mode imo. 120Gb Evo 840 for Windows and Desktop apps. 250gb Evo 840 for Steam 120Gb Evo 840 for Origin. each independent of each other and gaming is a joy R/ws on all are high 580Mbs R/Ws on SATA3, I would also suggest installing Samsungs driver magician. tweak via that but it doesn't need to run in taskbar. all userdata is on the NAS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mando Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 So I have 3 PCs and they are all on SSD, to show why Raid 0 is worth it guess which one is the Raid 0. One thing to mention, this is not the fastest SSD on the market, I bought the 1st one 1 year ago and second weeks ago, I didn't want to buy for 700$ of new SSD. 1st left Sata 2 controller? by any chance Nonsense. nonsense hes half right mate if its RAID mirrored itll lose 33% if its striped it wont (infact I don't think it will even see it as a compatible drive for the proposed set in striped) ive experienced this on a work level also when sites don't have the exact capacity drives, ive got by until a new hot spare arrived using a smaller capacity of the same model. but only on mirrored sets. anyhoos this isn't REALYL what the OP asked. kep them as separate drives one for windows and oen for your games for example, both can then be utilised seperately and at the same time, enhancing the gaming experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raid0 Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 1st left Sata 2 controller? by any chance Yes, it's the SSD on the Laptop. This SSD is very old, I first bought it for my main PC, then I put it in the Laptop to give it a second life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
President Devil Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 RAID0 voids TRIM support, so expect the life of your SSDs to go down on many if not most chipsets. Though you will see a performance increase, I wouldn't RAID0 a 120GB and a 250GB drive anyway, you'd lose quite a big amount of space as it would only double the 120GBs. Just JBOD them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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