SSD Parallel Configurations

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surfsk8snow.jah

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I'm conceptualizing a new build for the end of the year, and I've got a question about Drive configurations.
Which of the below two configurations would perform better, both in standard usage, and also in heavy high-queue usage & gaming?

SSD Options: Sata III120GB Intel 510/Vertex 3 MAXIOPS/Patriot Wildfire (My preference is Intel 510, but damn SF just has such insane benchmarks - don't know if it's worth the potential headache tho!)

Config 1) 1x SSD Boot Drive + SSD drive running other applications such as games, MS office, AutoCAD, etc.

Config 2) 2x SSD in RAID 0 Holding all of the above.

I guess the effect of Config 1 is to minimize the queue depth of each drive by splitting queue requests for each drive when running them concurrently - it can pull info from both discs in parallel and separately. It additionally avoids losing TRIM support on each drive.

The effect of Config 2 would be to stripe all files to both drives, and get RAID IO speed/bandwidth on all programs (amazing benchmarks to this regard - why buy 1 240GB when you can get 120GB+120GB with >2x performance??), but all from the same logical drive at the same time, stuffing 'more cars onto the same highway.' Additionally, you lose TRIM, but also gain the larger total drive size, and thus the 'side-effect' increased performance that results on SSDs from larger size.

I keep throwing them around in my head, but what are your opinions?
 
the performance option would be #2. you're essentially going to straight double your qd performance assuming your controller can keep up. I personally would get the wildfire, but that's just because I'm anti-ocz and they seem to have more problems (hell, go look at the nand sticky, the guy who wrote the ssd review bsod'd 3 times on a vertex 3 max iops)

the wildfire will slightly outperform a gt, but the gt is much less expensive at the moment especially with the hardocp code it has right now... anyways, enough about drives back to the config.

for your max iops drive, qd will not be an issue. there's really no way you'll actually cause your 4k qd to hit a bottleneck, you will be sailing through on either drive by itself. raided you'll definitely never hit the qd bottleneck unless you benchmark it.

you would keep your trim, on separate drives. personally I don't care about trim, but some people here will insist your drives will be extremely slow. I personally don't believe that and have never seen it with sandforce drives in an array, the internal garbage collection has always kept me going. trim would be nice, but I've never had my performance dip below to the point where it would have been worthwhile to split the drives up.

you also hit the head on the nail regarding the raid array of the two drives and space. when you raid them, you're giving half as many writes to each drive. you end up with twice as much free space. if you ended up filling drive 1 all the way, its performance would be way under drive 2, and you may not be able to keep the balance even.

for me, I would raid0 the two drives, and backup image them onto a 2tb raid1/raid5 array as often as I could. I would take the guaranteed speed of the raid array vs trying to balance.
 
If you raid0 them you just double your max throuput on the drive... the max IOs are not effected (unless you raid1 them)
I would prefer option 1 because with option 2 you loose trim and just gain more throuput which is nearly useless with operating system / program files this size
 
I've been running a couple RAID0 SSD arrays for well over a year now with no issues. If you keep about 10% of each drive unused, garbage collection will suffice. I believe anandtech mentioned this in one of the reviews.
 
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