SSD vs Raid 0 for gaming

..Brian..

As the title says. Purely from a gaming performance point of view, are SSD's really worth it? I have my OS on a 64bg crucial m4.

I'm thinking about getting two WD Blue 1tb HDDs and setting them up in raid 0. The drive will be used for steam and origin libraries and general storage music,pictures and non OS related programmes. Estimated cost £100 sterling delivered.

The alternative is a 250gb Samsung 840 at about £130 delivered.

In this application, is an SSD really worth 30% more money for 12.5% of the space??

Currently games and the files/programmes mentions above are on an external HDD taking up about 750gb.

BloodBath

I'd go with the wd blue 1tb. Don't know if I'd bother raiding them. It's going to have little effect on loading times.

Most games load fast anyway and the wd blues are fast hdd's. The processor decides loading times more than anything.

Most game data is compressed.

..Brian..

CPU is 3570k at 4.5ghz. 8gb ram btw if that makes a difference.

So raid might not even be worth it? Just the wd blue?

BloodBath

Yep.

..Brian..

Cool, that'll save me a few quid!

smacl

..Brian.. wrote: »

Cool, that'll save me a few quid!

Raid 0 is also strictly for data you wouldn't mind losing. A failure on either drive is liable to lead to losing all data on both. If you only need 1TB, I'd tend to go Raid 1 and take drive redundancy over speed. YMMV. Don't know what the blues are like, but I've had some very bad experience with WD greens.

bladesofglory

smacl wrote: »

Raid 0 is also strictly for data you wouldn't mind losing. A failure on either drive is liable to lead to losing all data on both. If you only need 1TB, I'd tend to go Raid 1 and take drive redundancy over speed. YMMV. Don't know what the blues are like, but I've had some very bad experience with WD greens.

Just some food for thought here,, Iv been raiding drives for a long long time at this stage using Raid-0 and never and had I experienced any failure.

raid 0 for OS

Raid 5 for backup

..Brian..

Does raid 0 reduce reliability / lifespan of a HDD? I get that all data is lost if one drive fails but would that not be the same risk as a single HDD?

Lu Tze

..Brian.. wrote: »

Does raid 0 reduce reliability / lifespan of a HDD? I get that all data is lost if one drive fails but would that not be the same risk as a single HDD?

No, you have doubled the risk.

bladesofglory

Lu Tze wrote: »

No, you have doubled the risk.

theoretically speaking its still only 1 drive, so yes it is the same as just one dying unless you have backup.

Lu Tze

bladesofglory wrote: »

theoretically speaking its still only 1 drive, so yes it is the same as just one dying unless you have backup.

You have two drives, A and B. Drive A fails, you lose everything. Drive B fails, you lose everything. Windows may see it at one drive but there are two.

If you did something mad like link 5 of them in a raid 0 array, you now have 5 individual components which can all cause the failure of the whole.

bladesofglory

Lu Tze wrote: »

You have two drives, A and B. Drive A fails, you lose everything. Drive B fails, you lose everything. Windows may see it at one drive but there are two.

If you did something mad like link 5 of them in a raid 0 array, you now have 5 individual components which can all cause the failure of the whole.

My Point my friend is theoretically its still only one drive, chances of any drive failing are very slim, coming from a person who has been running Hugh raid array for the past 10 years,

You are correct in saying though you are increasing your chances OF FAILURE,

..Brian..

Ok so I get that having 2 drives means twice the risk of failure etc but does Raid 0 itself negatively effect the HDDs? Like OCing your CPU reduces it's lifespan for example?

Monotype

No, it doesn't affect the lifespan of the drives.

The new WD blues are pretty fast... up to 180MB/s.
The types of games that you are playing really determine if RAID 0 is beneficial. I find that storing games on an SSD is handy as I don't like long load times. With superfetch on a hard drive and playing the same games regularly, you can actually see similar start up speeds. In game loading speeds mightn't match if you are using different data resources.

BloodBath

It's a bit faster with ssd's but not enough to justify the extra costs unless you have money to burn.

..Brian..

Thanks for the info guys, good to know. I'll probably just stick to 1 WD Blue so, it doesn't seem beneficial to spend the extra money on raiding them or SSD's. Lets not forget my games are currently on an external Freecom HDD about 3 years old so a new WD is likely to be a good speed increase in itself. What program do you use to bench HDD speeds? Will run it when I get home for a laugh.

Lu Tze

..Brian.. wrote: »

Thanks for the info guys, good to know. I'll probably just stick to 1 WD Blue so, it doesn't seem beneficial to spend the extra money on raiding them or SSD's. Lets not forget my games are currently on an external Freecom HDD about 3 years old so a new WD is likely to be a good speed increase in itself. What program do you use to bench HDD speeds? Will run it when I get home for a laugh.

Ive used hdtune before. You should see a big difference. I had wd raptor before which i short striped to see if it made any difference (it did) but it would still be slow compared to a modern hard drive.

Laviski

gaming pc in general doesnt write that much data or doesnt need to. best benefit for gaming is raid 1 or if you really want overkill and money aint an issue raid 10.

Monotype

Your external drive will be 40MB/s if you're using USB 2.

Even an oldish drive will show improvement by using eSATA or by moving it internally.

bladesofglory

BloodBath wrote: »

It's a bit faster with ssd's but not enough to justify the extra costs unless you have money to burn.

From my experience its very noticeable the difference in speed

BloodBath

Not from the benchmarks I've seen. It depends on the drives of course.

..Brian..

So I benched the Freecom external HDD ..... fairly rubbish thb!




Compared to Monotype's bench below from another thread, I think it's fair to say I will see a notable difference in loading times just by upgrading to a WD Blue!

Monotype wrote: »

Here's my SSD for the craic

Tea_Bag

why not 1 blue drive and use your 64gb ssd as the cache? what motherboard do you have?

can i argue for SSD raid0? thought id try out too :P

BloodBath

My ocz agility 3 60gb has slower reads/writes than the 1tb wd blue

Time to get a samsung 840 evo and use the agility as a cache drive me thinks.

Tea_Bag

time to learn wtf burst rate is and how to use it :eek: 3132.6 MB/s :eek:

..Brian..

Tea_Bag wrote: »

why not 1 blue drive and use your 64gb ssd as the cache? what motherboard do you have?

can i argue for SSD raid0? thought id try out too :P

Wow, awesome speeds! Don't know anything about using SSD as the cache, will do some research. Mobo is AsRock Z77 Extreme 4.

smacl

bladesofglory wrote: »

My Point my friend is theoretically its still only one drive, chances of any drive failing are very slim, coming from a person who has been running Hugh raid array for the past 10 years,

You are correct in saying though you are increasing your chances OF FAILURE,

I'm running a mix of PCs here, of various vintage. A quick tot shows 9 PCs and 3 laptops with a total of 28 hdds in my officer. The number goes up and down, but I've had a similar enough network for the past couple of decades. I typically experience about 1-2 hdd failures per year, typically on the PCs with higher workload. e.g. we're running automated testing most of the time, and those drives see a lot of thrashing and suffer as a result. Other recent failures include a couple of WD greens in a NAS system which was thankfully raid 1. Been running raid 10 on the main server for years and had no issues, but it was built to be running all the time.

Point is, time to failure depend on your build, how good the drive is, how hot your PC runs, and how much disk activity you incur. All hdds fail eventually, but I agree that raid 0 makes sense on boot and apps if you can re-image quickly and cheaply.

Given drives are cheap, I'm actually planning on changing my PC to SSD for boot, and 4x2TB raid 10 for main storage. What drives would people recommend for a reasonable price / reliability mix? Speed is less of an issue, as the SSD will be doing anything involving intensive use. ( Don't say WD green )

Monotype

..Brian.. wrote: »

So I benched the Freecom external HDD ..... fairly rubbish thb!

I told you; you're limited by USB2. Use eSATA if it supports it or move it internally. Or get another enclosure with eSATA or USB 3.

Also, is that the latest firmware that's on your Crucial M4? Firmware has been released over the time to greatly improve performance - one boosted by nearly 20%.

smacl

BloodBath wrote: »

My ocz agility 3 60gb has slower reads/writes than the 1tb wd blue

Time to get a samsung 840 evo and use the agility as a cache drive me thinks.

Remember reading somewhere that SSD speed is dependent to a large extent on size, where larger drives are faster. I'll dig out the reference when I get a chance. I put 32GB ram in my new box to give myself a 16gb scratch ram disk, which really speeds up some apps, though not the one I'd bought it for.

..Brian..

Monotype wrote: »

I told you; you're limited by USB2. Use eSATA if it supports it or move it internally. Or get another enclosure with eSATA or USB 3.

Also, is that the latest firmware that's on your Crucial M4? Firmware has been released over the time to greatly improve performance - one boosted by nearly 20%.

Probably not, haven't done anything to it in the year I have it. Must look into that when home.

Monotype

smacl wrote: »

Remember reading somewhere that SSD speed is dependent to a large extent on size, where larger drives are faster. I'll dig out the reference when I get a chance.

No need, you can see by just looking at the speeds of the various capacities. Essentially, it's because you're writing to more chips at the same time (à la RAID 0) to achieve higher performance.

The reason for the Agility being slow in some results is that it's got (i)asynchronous NAND and (ii) a Sandforce SF-2281 controller.
Asynchronous NAND can cause slow downs most notably as the drive fills up. The Sandforce controller works well with compressible data but performance falls away with incompressible data (but they still quote the high speeds when selling the drives!). Different benchmarks tools can use varied ways of testing the drive so Sandforce drives can come out looking really good or really bad. The reality is somewhere in between as your data is likely to be varied.

BloodBath

Brian maybe do what I plan on doing. Grab a 120gb samsung 840 evo ssd for your os and programs and use the 64gb ssd you have now as a cache drive for the 1tb wd blue.

..Brian..

Yea looks like a good option. For now the WD Blue will suffice. Down the line I think I will get a new 120bg 840 fo OS etc and use the 64gb m4 as cache drive for the WD Blue as you suggest. Don't have the funds now.

:EDIT: Just saw the 840 Evo 1tb!! Noice!

bladesofglory

Well Guys I thought id throw up my read/write speeds,,

..Brian..

I dunno if I'm reading this right but is that a read speed of 2100 MB/s ???

bladesofglory

..Brian.. wrote: »

I dunno if I'm reading this right but is that a read speed of 2100 MB/s ???

Yep

..Brian..

Wowsers! Is that SSD in Raid 0?

bladesofglory

..Brian.. wrote: »

Wowsers! Is that SSD in Raid 0?

Its 4 x Corsair Force Series GS, 2.5" SSD, 120GB each, Pretty good speed/

Cuddlesworth

Useless speed. Although it would appear you have money to burn, so go nuts.

Tea_Bag

In his defense, those ssds are mad cheap . One of mine is second hand.

That said, that is completely unnecessary.

BloodBath

Could have got a 1tb Samsung 840 evo instead for a little more though. It would only be about 1/4 of that sequential read/write speed but the random access would be be way higher and over double the capacity.

bladesofglory

Tea_Bag wrote: »

In his defense, those ssds are mad cheap . One of mine is second hand.

That said, that is completely unnecessary.

When has anything in high - end enthusiast building been necessary???

bladesofglory

BloodBath wrote: »

Could have got a 1tb Samsung 840 evo instead for a little more though. It would only be about 1/4 of that sequential read/write speed but the random access would be be way higher and over double the capacity.

You really trying to flog those Samsung drive,are you working on commission?

BloodBath

No I just want one

bladesofglory

BloodBath wrote: »

No I just want one

Ha. Ok No problem.

smacl

bladesofglory wrote: »

When has anything in high - end enthusiast building been necessary???

Depends on context. I keep a 16gb RAM disk going on my development PC, which does significantly increase speed over SSD (factor of 10 according to some). The 32gb total ram came in at €235, which isn't so much of an outlay. Building big C++ projects can easily become I/O bound, and ram disks have long been used as a solution.

Don't see it making a blind bit of difference for gaming, as the amount of disk i/o isn't likely to be that high, and the bottlenecks will be elsewhere.

Serephucus

He's not the only one; I'd have gone for the 1TB Evo in a second over a RAID of older, smaller drives. Do I need 2GB/s for my games? No. I could very easily fill up a terabyte though.

bladesofglory

Serephucus wrote: »

He's not the only one; I'd have gone for the 1TB Evo in a second over a RAID of older, smaller drives. Do I need 2GB/s for my games? No. I could very easily fill up a terabyte though.

You have inspired me !!!!