Home SSD vs SATA RAID

flangeman

I'm starting to look at building a machine for video and photography editing etc.. I work with 12MB files and the video stuff will start going HD pretty soon. I've decided to have a look at working with two separate arrays, one potentially SSD and the other SATA. I do mind smaller SSD drives 60gb etc.. coz I can move my work off to the other slower SATA array when I'm not using it, or archive it. 30GB doesn't give me a lot to play with, but with the apps on the other partition and only the data I'm working on and the windows install on the 30GB (windows Ultimate is about 15GB). 45GB is more than enough (at the moment) plus the 2 SSD drives will be in a RAID 0 configuration for speed (I couldn't give a toss about redundancy, I can backup everything anyway and restore on a total failure). The rest of the machine I'm going to look at later, but I'll be going down the INTEL i7 series with a decent motherboard.

Now the question, is it really worth it, 233.07 quid for an SSD array?
Will I really get total kickarse bandwidth write and read to the storage or am I being greedy?
Surely that seek time of 0.35ms on the SSD disks will really give it umph or is that negated in a RAID configuration?

Anyho:
SSD
2 x OCZ 30GB 2.5" SATAII Solid Series Solid State Drive
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152601
Deliver up to 155 MB/s and 90 MB/s read/write speeds and seek times of less than 0.35ms
233.07 = 179.98 (2 x 89.99 SSD) + 53.09 (Promise FastTrak TX2300)

SATA HD
4 x Maxtor STM380815AS 80GB Hard Drive 7200rpm SATAII 8MB Cache - OEM
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131311
Average seek time of 11ms
215.5 = 115.72 (4 x 28.93 HD) + 99.78 (Promise 4 Channel SATA II )

Thanks for looking at this.

flangeman

I'm having a goo at this at the moment - http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055300504

I'm probably going down the SSD route, sounds like the difference really is something else.

Inquitus

Don't know if you've read this, but Custom PC did a big labs test on SSD's recently (Feb-09), and I found alot of the results genuinelly underwhelming.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/605430/ssds/introduction.html

http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/605430/ssds/products.html

There it is.

Inq

PS. Not sure if the one they tested is the same as the one you propose to buy, but it gave distinctly underwhelming results, the issue being the memory controller is a bottleneck and doesnt allow anywhere near the theoretical read write rates of the chips.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/247547/ocz-32gb-core.html

like anything you get what you pay for, and while the results of the top notch SSD's is something to behold, theres alot on the market that really fail to deliver HD beating speeds, and yet still charge a premium.

Coyote

if your thinking about buying one then you really need to read some good reviews
of them and understand why some of them are not that good and others are well worth the money.

the truth is 95% of the time most people are not writing large files to the hard drive
it's all about the small random read and writes your OS makes.
this is a very good brake down of why you prob should buy a Intel one (cost €400)
for a 80gb one or the OCZ Vertex (€150) for a 30gb.

Anandtech review of SSD

most of the cheep SSD out there use the JMicron controller which sucks.
from the large amount of info i have picked up on SSD they seem to be one of the
best upgrades you and buy to improve the day to day working of your pc.

Coyote

uberpixie

TBH the only SSDs worth considering are the Intel ones atm.

Also remember write is where SSDs fall down and SSDs can become fragmented and there is no easy way to defragment them atm.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669

For multi media I would stick with standard SATA drives. (much faster for writting to which is what you want for editing)

SSDs just are not quite ready for prime time just yet.

Also my mate bought a 30 gig OCZ SSD to play with in a work laptop: stuttering all over the shop, he finds it a pain in the ass overall and is dissapointed.

AlmightyCushion

Coyote wrote: »

if your thinking about buying one then you really need to read some good reviews
of them and understand why some of them are not that good and others are well worth the money.

the truth is 95% of the time most people are not writing large files to the hard drive
it's all about the small random read and writes your OS makes.
this is a very good brake down of why you prob should buy a Intel one (cost €400)
for a 80gb one or the OCZ Vertex (€150) for a 30gb.

Anandtech review of SSD

most of the cheep SSD out there use the JMicron controller which sucks.
from the large amount of info i have picked up on SSD they seem to be one of the
best upgrades you and buy to improve the day to day working of your pc.

Coyote

Read that anandtech article the other day and while it was long it was a fantastic read. It's a pity that the only drives really worth owning are the intel ones. I'm tempted to get an ssd but I don't want the stuttering and I don't want to fork out a lot of cash.

Coyote

the Intel one's are the best but cost a bomb
the point about the OCZ Vertex is that they seem to have solved the
stuttering prob with changes to the firmware, it has slower write speeds but still faster than
standard hd but it has removed the write latency that was making the older drivers stutter
and now has 64mb cache as well.

SSD don't become fragmented what happens is the data is not removed when you delete
something (OS does not report it to the HD) so when all the blocks are used once,
the drive then has to erase a block before writing to it again,
but if you look at the write speeds even after being used they still write
nearly 2 time as fast as a normal hd.

that problem should be removed with win7 and a flash of the firmware
(no guarantee that drive makers will make that firmware for your disk, but they prob will)
you can fix the prob with some software but you have to wipe the disk.

yea your buying cutting edge hardware but I think with some care you can pickup one
that's nearly as good as the Intel and a lot cheaper.
i will be picking one up when i build my i7 in a few weeks.
I will probably throw the SSD i get in to my laptop in a year and get a better and bigger one for even less.

again don't go buying one just because i said every thing should be fine
you have to decide that yourself, wait for a few more reviews of the OCZ Vertex,
but please make sure that the reviews that you read is not just some guy running benchmarking tools
and that it's a real life use test. that what happened the first time they were reviewed
99% of the sites did not really test them properly

coyote

PogMoThoin

flangeman wrote: »

I'm starting to look at building a machine for video and photography editing etc.. I work with 12MB files and the video stuff will start going HD pretty soon. I've decided to have a look at working with two separate arrays, one potentially SSD and the other SATA. I do mind smaller SSD drives 60gb etc.. coz I can move my work off to the other slower SATA array when I'm not using it, or archive it. 30GB doesn't give me a lot to play with, but with the apps on the other partition and only the data I'm working on and the windows install on the 30GB (windows Ultimate is about 15GB). 45GB is more than enough (at the moment) plus the 2 SSD drives will be in a RAID 0 configuration for speed (I couldn't give a toss about redundancy, I can backup everything anyway and restore on a total failure). The rest of the machine I'm going to look at later, but I'll be going down the INTEL i7 series with a decent motherboard.

Now the question, is it really worth it, 233.07 quid for an SSD array?
Will I really get total kickarse bandwidth write and read to the storage or am I being greedy?
Surely that seek time of 0.35ms on the SSD disks will really give it umph or is that negated in a RAID configuration?

Anyho:
SSD
2 x OCZ 30GB 2.5" SATAII Solid Series Solid State Drive
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152601
Deliver up to 155 MB/s and 90 MB/s read/write speeds and seek times of less than 0.35ms
233.07 = 179.98 (2 x 89.99 SSD) + 53.09 (Promise FastTrak TX2300)

SATA HD
4 x Maxtor STM380815AS 80GB Hard Drive 7200rpm SATAII 8MB Cache - OEM
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131311
Average seek time of 11ms
215.5 = 115.72 (4 x 28.93 HD) + 99.78 (Promise 4 Channel SATA II )

Thanks for looking at this.

WTF, Why is Your option 2 Maxtor, and why only with 8MB Cache

There are much better quality HD's than Maxtor. Hitachi, Western Digital, Samsung and even Seagate (not fond of these myself either) produce much better HD's. Maxtor really are the cheapo option IMO.
A 16 or 32MB cache hd has better transfer rate, less use on the cpu, and shorter access time. All this adds up to the fact that the larger the cache the better the performance. Wiki


I've not ventured down the SSD route myself yet as my 2x 36GB Western Digital Raptors (4 years old) still produce great speeds



my other HD's are Samsung f1 Sata's with 32MB cache, I've a few of them in different pc's

extra-ordinary_

Read that Anand article too - as regards Intel being the best performing - he was talking about MLC drives. There are lots of good SLC drives available but they're not as cheap as MLC.
I was just in the middle of trying to track down the cheapest price for one of those new G.Skill titans the day I read that article and then he goes and rubbishes them!
Currently I've got two mtrons in a raid stripe and have to say I'm really happy with them. As Anand says... there's no other upgrade where you'll see such a visible change in general performance. That said, they are an expensive luxury but justifiable if your'e fairly happy with the rest of your system but are still itching to upgrade something!