Raid 0 SSD vs single SSD for Battlefield 3 or other games?

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DeadByDawn

Limp Gawd
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Sep 3, 2004
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I have two new intel 520 series 180gb drives and i was thinking about going raid 0 for my game drive.
I already have early g2 generation intel drives for my OS, games, and applications (yes, 3 seperate SSDs) .

I googled around and couldnt really find much that would compared non-raid vs raid-0 for battlefield 3. I love ths game and i am an enthusiast.

A lot of folks say its not worth it. I think this is based on what you are doing. I am wondering if the disk I/O behavior with BF3 take advantage of a stripe in raid 0 (loading the game, loading levels, etc.).

I already have a fast system, but am always looking to see if i can squeak out more.

Thanks in advance.
 
I would skip raid if you dont need it for the extra space. 500mb/s(sata3) is already going to load BF3 fast and the extra 1/2 sec of time saved is not worth going to raid. I do have raid0 for my games, but it was simply to use small SSDs that I had already and I gave mine a lot of empty space.
 
honestly bf3 doesn't benefit as much as you think from SSDs. the majority of the time spent loading the level is actually stuff being streamed down from the server. having it on an SSD will speed it up, but there is a limit to how much it will help due to how the game is just designed.
 
Thanks for the replies so far.
I currently have single intel SSDs, just wondering if I would get stuff to load even faster in raid 0. I think u are right about the network chatter during level changes being the bigger bottleneck.
 
The SSD raid will not offer you any spectacular benefits, will introduce an additional point of failure (lose 1 of 2 separate drives you lose 1 drive, lose 1 of the RAID stripe you lose all). In addition the loss of trim (depending on the drives can/will decrease performance and increase write amplification (of just GC vs GC/Trim)). I have tried it with a few drives, had almost no perceptible difference. 2 seconds here or there.
 
I'm going to be the odd man out and say go for it if you can do it, RAID0 with a good set of SSDs offers tangible and noticeable performance improvements, improvements which are most definitely measurable.

The 'additional point of failure' argument is mostly moot with SSDs, SSDs are nothing but hugely parallel banks of NAND in a striped array anyway and doubling that set isn't really going to amount to much additional risk . Sure, adding the fact that there is another drive with another physical cable connecting it adds a slight risk (say if the data or power cable comes loose) - but again we're mostly splitting heirs.

Lack of TRIM in a RAID is of some concern even with the advanced garbage collection built into modern SSDs, but if it ever does become a problem you can always perform a secure erase on the SSDs and regain that performance instantly. Eventually the Intel RST 11.5 driver set will come out and supposedly it will have support for TRIM in RAID...
 
It may be measurable, but I'd question the tangible and noticeable portion. You just aren't normally doing all that much sequential reading where the increased performance is going to matter - the access times on an SSD are already basically zero, so you won't get any benefit to random performance from RAID.
 
When it comes to BF3 online play there won't be any benefit, the level might load 2 seconds faster but that just means you have to wait 2 more seconds in the countdown. RAID 0 won't improve the random performance on SSDs.
 
I've run BF3 in RAID0 and single drive with Kingston HyperX 240GB.
Difference is not noticable AT ALL at level load time. Using a SSD improved level load times by a lot to the point that yes, you'll still have to wait for the countdown timer to start at level start BUT you won't be the last loser to boot into the level with a HDD and have to leg it all the way to the first flag because there are no vehicles left.
Highly recommend SSDs for BF3, I'd go with the HyperX 3K 480GB though if I could even though perf is slightly lower overall.
SSDs in a RAID are a bit of a waste though, example, how big do you think BF3 is (how much data is copied to memory) at start. Not much right, maybe 2GB?!? Right, so the data size (varied file sizes) is so small that 2GB of data can easily be loaded up in 4-8 seconds with one SSD, a second SSD in RAID 0isn't really going to push the performance that much higher since there is protocol overhead for doing RAID 0 and internally the SSDs can only really go so fast dependant on the data type(compressible/incompressible)/size.

Remember that SSDs in a RAID to not scale linearly to the amount of SSDs you have, 4 SSDs will not give you 4x the performance. It's better to have 1 big SSD than 2 small ones. Failure points on SSDs can be exasperated via RAID due to your reliance on a consumer grade RAID controller with buggy drivers/controllers (which to be honest is useless compared to a proper dedicated RAID HBA like LSI or Adaptec).

If you're going to do RAID, do it properly with a proper RAID HBA.

As I said, based on personal experience as a gamer, hardware engineer and budding iOS developer, don't bother with RAID 0 on SSDs with consumer grade workloads and hardware.;)
 
@d3m0n5 from what I have seen bf3 loads the level from the drive every time. Loads were much faster going from a 3x 7200 R0 to a single SSD. I didn't notice anything going to SSD R0 though. Once you have played a map, I believe it stays in memory. For me it is uncommon to get to that point of playing the same map twice, I normally rage, the game drops me or both...:( Otherwise, agreed, single drive is best.
 
BF3 load times with a couple striped SSD's will make Z E R O difference. You're far better off with something like a single 256GB Crucial M4 than you are with 2 x 128GB SSD's in R0.
 
i have my 2 ssd's in raid 0 only to have them as 1 storage space. loading games from a single to raid 0 is kinda minimal and not really needed. if i could do it over i would of just bought a single 512gb drive =/
 
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