Thread: Is SSD's and RAID worth it?

I'm looking to start a computer build and am wondering, is SSD's combined with RAID worth the money? It's expensive as hell, so I really want someone to convince me that they're worth it to have.

I believe SSD TRIM support will not work in RAID. You should not use SSD in a RAID setup. SSD is a great improvement in a system's speed and you don't need a large one. 120GB is plenty for OD and apps.

You can use RAID for all your non-SSD drives though.

I love my Intel 320 160 GB SSD

SSD's do work with RAID, and yes I wouldn't need a lot of them (probably 4 120GB's) but speed is my name and 4 SSD's on RAID would be amazing. I'm just wondering if it really is worth the expenses.

Originally Posted by gr3

SSD's do work with RAID, and yes I wouldn't need a lot of them (probably 4 120GB's) but speed is my name and 4 SSD's on RAID would be amazing. I'm just wondering if it really is worth the expenses.

IMO I think it wouldn't. Yes it would be fast, but worth the money? A single SSD on it's own is PLENTY fast enough, and from personal experience with 2 SSD's in RAID 0, I couldn't see a huge difference that justified the cost. If they were cheaper or you have the spare cash, sure why not.

Also, what strepb was saying was that TRIM doesn't work with RAID, not that SSDs won't work with RAID. TRIM support is a important feature, so that would be another issue. I'm not sure if they fixed that yet, but last time I checked TRIM only works in ahci, not ide or raid.

Unless you are doing work that is processor and hard drive incentive, it would not be worth it. First if your processor is not powerful enough to even optimally use the hard drive speed. RAID uses tend to differ slightly on different RAID types. There are some for speed only, for multiple redundancy and optimal speed.

SSD's work in RAID but strepb is right about no TRIM support with SSD's in a RAID array. You can have an SSD on a raid controller and TRIM will work but not if they are in an array. It is not recommended to run any SSD's without TRIM inlcuding in a RAID array or in Windows XP. You will want TRIM support on an SSD....

If you google it, there is confusion when Intel released a driver to support TRIM commands on SSD's connected to Intel onboard RAID controllers. The support was to allow TRIM commands to be sent to a non-raided SSD on a RAID controller using something called IDE passthrough. The catch is the SSD(s) can't belong to an active array or IDE passthrough does not work. I confirmed this with Intel only a couple of weeks ago.

TRIM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think that going with about four to six 500GB spinpoint F3s in raid 0, striped to the first 100GB will give you similar results to an SSD only much more space and faster write times than SSD. All that for about half the price of two SSDs.

Hard Drives & Storage - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net
That's a great site to do research on hard drives, I learned a lot from lurking there.

SSD's are so worth it regardless of your setup even the slow write speed ones have amazing access times because its flash which means your computer is so much more responsive and fast.