Corsair C300 SSD: raid0 2x 64gb or 1x 128gb?

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GenBanks

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I'm thinking of finally jumping on the SSD bandwagon since everyone seems to say that it makes a very noticeable difference over mechanical drives. The Corsair C300 seems to be very fast and relatively affordable. It comes in 64gb, 128gb and 256gb.

I'm trying to decide between two of these in raid0 (64gb):
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1

or one of these (128gb):
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CTFDDAC128MAG-1G1

Rated read speeds on all three sizes are the same (355mb/s) but write speeds are slower on the smaller drives: 75Mb/s on the 64gb, 140mb/s on the 128gb.

I'm completely new to the world of SSDs so I'm clueless about any practical pitfalls/advantages of smaller drives or raid0. I plan on using the SSD as my boot drive with windows 7 and some frequently used programs. The drives will be plugged into a MSI Big Bang Xpower which has support for SATA3. I will also have a 1tb samsung hard drive for whatever doesn't fit. I use my PC primarily for gaming (though of course I do other stuff on it too).

Would greatly appreciate your opinions!
 
GenBanks said:
Rated read speeds on all three sizes are the same (355mb/s) but write speeds are slower on the smaller drives: 75Mb/s on the 64gb, 140mb/s on the 128gb.

I'm completely new to the world of SSDs so I'm clueless about any practical pitfalls/advantages of smaller drives or raid0. I plan on using the SSD as my boot drive with windows 7 and some frequently used programs. The drives will be plugged into a MSI Big Bang Xpower which has support for SATA3. I will also have a 1tb samsung hard drive for whatever doesn't fit. I use my PC primarily for gaming (though of course I do other stuff on it too).

Would greatly appreciate your opinions!
Click to expand...

As you can kind of make out from the specs, bigger drives to an extent "RAID" more memory chips together. So you not only get more capacity, but also increased performance. The upside is that the single bigger drive will still support the TRIM feature, while using 2 SSD's in a RAID configuration will not be able to use TRIM even if the drives themselves support the feature. As far as I know, no RAID controller as of yet can pass TRIM commands between the OS and the drives in a RAID pair.

Not having TRIM will be fine for probably the first year or so, but just like not defraging a disk drive, it will catch up with you after a while. But of course the only thing stopping this is the RAID controllers themselves, the OS and Drives are willing and ready. So its just a matter of time, and I imagine someone is working on it because it would be a HUUUGGEEE selling point for many customers.

Thats what ultimatly led me to buy the 160GB Intel versus 2x80GB even though the 2x80GB was actually cheaper. After already owning a first gen SSD without TRIM I did not want to go down that path again.
 
Why not just wipe(secure erase) the raided drives once in while, like ever 6months or so?
Should restore performance if I understand things correct...
 
sweloop64 said:
Why not just wipe(secure erase) the raided drives once in while, like ever 6months or so?
Should restore performance if I understand things correct...
Click to expand...

think about what that entails: image (exact bit copies) the two drives off and into some storage, nuke the drives, boot from somewhere (??), trim the drives, image back. All and all you're probably talking about at least a days worth of work.

The write performance degrades to an absolute minimum which is still respectable. It stems from the fact that when a sector is deleted logically the bits themselves are left as is, and when that sector gets written to again, the drive must first flash the bits through a 0 state.
 
Thanks for the helpful replies, I might get the 128gb one then. Coming from a mechanical drive I imagine that I will still be be impressed with the speed.

Quick question though:
I can see in MrWizard6600's sig that you have two SSDs in Raid0... does the slowdown from lack of TRIM noticeable to you?

& generally, does SSD speed without TRIM in Raid0 over time go down to the speed single drive, or does it get worse than that?
 
image (exact bit copies) the two drives off and into some storage, nuke the drives, boot from somewhere (??), trim the drives, image back. All and all you're probably talking about at least a days worth of work.
Click to expand...
A day's worth of work?

You're slower than I am! :D

Takes me @ 1 - 1.5 hrs........and that's with 'refreshment' breaks. :)
 
I wanted to add a further question relating to my system:
will I run into any problems running the c300 off of the big bang xpower's 6gbps sata3 port?
I read on a different site that there are some problems with onboard sata3 speeds and that it's better to get an addon card. I'm not too keen on doing that though. Is this true?
 
fyi, this is where I read it:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/07/21/crucial-realssd-c300-64gb-ssd-review/8


"To hit these speeds, you do have to get a fast SATA 6Gbps port, and we're extremely sceptical that on-board ports deliver this. The most reliable way to unlock the full performance of a Crucial C300 drive is to buy an add-in card such as the HighPoint Rocket 620, which adds £40 to your upgrade. Of course, the drive still works fine with SATA 3Gbps ports, so you could argue that by getting a C300 without the HighPoint card is still fine, and gives you an element of future-proofing."
 
The corsair c300 should not be used it in RAID. it has terrible "healing" characteristics when TRIM is not used. Check out anand's review on the C300 for more details.

The only drives that are good for RAID today are the sandforce drives.
 
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