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Ssd raid 0 pros and cons

dash09

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Should this be done on a pc just for gaming? Windows is on a nvme m.2 and I dont want to change that, am considering a ssd raid setup entirely for steam.

Is there a genuine speed benefit across the board and is it worthwhile? For example a 2 second faster game load time is not worthwhile for me
If I decide to change motherboards, will the raid setup be simple plug and play in the new board?
Should I consider other raid types? I have 2 ssd's, could throw in a third but its an older 480gb so I'd rather not
I have backups so I'm not concerned about drive failure and losing data, what other risks are there?
 
@Dash I'm running Raid 0 on 2 nvme drives, to be honest game load not much of a difference if compared to when I had a single drive.
Only difference I REALLY notice if I copy something to this raid set its quicker.
Cons is obviously you don not have redundancy if one drive fail bye bye to whole raid set lol.

As for moving this to a new board I honestly do not know if it will work or not.
 
Well, if you can afford a 3rd SSD, consider RAID 5

Or if you don't care for possible data loss, just use RAID 0 and enjoy the speed -- you won't need to get a 3rd drive for it either
 
If you able to get decent speeds out of your disks then i don't see the need unless you want to combine the storage.
As @Havoc said, loose one drive, loose all data.

I just spread my steam installs over 2 drives if needed.
 
I did mine in December. New layout: NVME boot, SSD-raid0 & 1x mechanical.

I was playing NFS which doesn't use a lot of RAM and goes to disc frequently as it loads textures, which resulted in quite a choppy experience in places. Making the move to the RAID-0 SSD made a HUGE difference to me as none of my games suffer from in-game issues like this. I am super happy as this disc also doubles as my scratch drive.
 
Well whats the likelihood of a drive failure in raid?
Reason I'm considering doing this is because I currently have 2x 2tb hdds and the 480gb ssd, games I am currently playing are on the ssd and backups on the mechs.
I bought 2 of those micron 2tb ssds and I intend to remove both mechs. Bonus is that I can then remove the entire hdd cage and finally sort out my cabling.

For a game like red dead, will the raid help?
 
And I'm considering moving to an itx case, hence the query about changing motherboards
 
Well the likelihood of a drive failing is like asking how long is a peace of string lol.... thing is with SSDs most of them just go because its all circuitry there is no signs like with a mechanical that give you signs before it goes.

I'm running RAID0 for the pass 2 years with my samsung 960 evo, but i have a image of my whole OS, so should my drive fail I can just dump the image i have on the new drive and im good to go.

But i use my RAID setup strictly for OS only and then 1-2 games I play alot/frequently , rest is sitting on mechanical drives, sounds like you want to use the 2 x SSD for everything will surely shorten the life span of the SSDs, as all SSDs have a certain "read andwrite live span usually measured in TB"
 
If you're going software raid, I think you may even lose your data on a Windows reinstall.

But, one thing I was contemplating about when thinking about is using a raid setup for my games and having it constantly backed up to a mechanical drive (either on my NAS or my gaming pc) so that I also have redundancy in case a drive fails or my OS needs a refresh or something.

The other question I have is are you talking about SATA SSDs or NVMe ssds?
Because if you're talking about SATA, you might as well sell those SSDs and just buy a single high speed NVMe drive that will be as fast as 6x SATA SSDs at maximum, without the RAID complications

*EDIT nvm, I see they're the Micron SATA SSDs. What I'd probably suggest is getting a 1TB NVMe for games you're currently playing and use the SATA SSDs for games you play now and then. I know for my steam library, 80% of them barely tax a SATA SSD.
Or you can try and get fancy and use StoreMI for some fancy caching so that the most recent played games are cached and fast
 
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I'm going to be staight with you, if you're asking these questions stay away from RAID 0 on your main machine (of course do play with it on a spare PC if you can afford to lose all your data)
 
I'm completely fine not doing the raid, 1 drive will be used for steam and the other for everything else like origin and Rockstar. Main thing is I get better than mechanical drive performance

Sent from my LYA-L09 using Tapatalk
 
Pros don't outweigh possible data loss on the whole partition. Performance in game on RAID0 for me was negligible. If your games are loaded on a normal SSD you're fine. Rather keep everything on seperate SSDs, and when you lose one drive, at least you keep the other's data. Also, software RAID configs aren't great.
 
Pros don't outweigh possible data loss on the whole partition. Performance in game on RAID0 for me was negligible. If your games are loaded on a normal SSD you're fine. Rather keep everything on seperate SSDs, and when you lose one drive, at least you keep the other's data. Also, software RAID configs aren't great.

Consider this, RAID0 one drive fails you lose the data, single drive and the drive fails you lose the data.

The only difference with RAID0 is you're doubling the chance of a drive failure by using 2 drives.
 
Consider this, RAID0 one drive fails you lose the data, single drive and the drive fails you lose the data.

The only difference with RAID0 is you're doubling the chance of a drive failure by using 2 drives.

Ja this is a great way of putting it
 

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