I have 3 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drives, and was curious what would be the best configuration to put them in for windows 8? I was thinking of using one for the boot drive, one for data, and one for scratch disk/cache. The other setup I was considering is one for boot and the other two in a JBOD setup. I don't see any reason to put them in raid 0 as it doesn't seem there would be any added performance since they are already so fast. I'm not concerned about backup because I am already backing up to an external raid 1 drive. Suggestions?
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3What is the end goal? This is an extremely subjective question and really doesn't give details about what you ultimately are trying to achieve...– TheCompWizCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 14:17
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Agreed with previous answer. Sounds like the only solution would be to use the 3 drives separately non raid, but if that were the case, you wouldn't have asked the question.– SimkillCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 14:28
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I do a lot of different tasks: programming, 3D CAD, 3D modeling, 3D rendering, video editing, video compression, photoshop, working with ISO's, running several virtual machines, etc. so I pretty much just need an all around good performance solution in general, but also want it to last a while. Does that help at all?– DavidoCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 14:28
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@Simkill: That's the direction I'm thinking of going, but not sure if there is a good reason to use one of the drives just for cache/scratch disk/paging file. Would that improve performance or not really?– DavidoCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 14:31
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Seeing as they are SSD, I don't see why dumping the page file to a separate physical disk will make much difference. On normal disk drives it was to reduce seek times, but as there is no spinning disk to worry about, that reason is mute. All you would benefit from really is bandwidth of the dedicated SATA your using, and I would be surprised if you're working your PC hard enough to really need 6.3gbs for a page file.– SimkillCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 14:46
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1 Answer
Are you having them exclusively or in addition to hard drive(s)? Is this a critical system you do not want to spend time rebuilding?
SSD reliability is still an uknown, full of surprises. So RAID 0 or no RAID carries a high probability you may need to restore from backup.
If possible, and if I could live with only 256 GiB of available storage, I would go for RAID 1 (mirroring) with a hot spare (online). Or RAID 1 for OS and applications with user data, cache and virtual memory in the third disk, because it is so much easier to restore only user data.
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Only SSD drives, no mechanical drives. It's not a critical system, but where time is money, I'd like to have it last at least two years before I have to rebuild. From my understanding, there are many things in windows I can disable to greatly extend the life of an SSD, such as disabling pre fetching and defrag, etc. Is there any performance hit for doing RAID 1 on the OS drive?– DavidoCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 15:21
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@Louis As in worse performance for doing RAID 1 vs a single drive.– DavidoCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 15:38
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RAID 1 with a decent controller should represent no performance hit at all, since it only mirrors, no parity calculations involved. Even in software, given you have no significant memory or CPU constraints, it should be imperceptible. Now, if time is money, the ideal would be indeed RAID 1 (or 10, if you could add one or two more drives), preferrably with an online spare.– LeandroCommented Jul 24, 2013 at 15:46