single big ssd vs a few smaller ones

[cucker tarlson]

I'm wondering if moving to a single 2TB ssd would benefit me in any way.

my current setup
su900 128gb (3d mlc,bought last year for os only)
2x850 pro 256gb (3d mlc,biught in 2015-16 as os/game drives,now used for games only)
1x850 pro 512gb,bought in 2017 for games
1x860evo 500gb,3d tlc,bought this or last year for games
1x xpg sx950u 480gb,3d tlc,bought this year for games

all fit nicely in my full tower case,my hdds are in docking station.

would selling them for a single 2tb make any sense,apart from using less space in my case,which is not a problem for me.I've always thought having more smaller drives is better since the drives don't have to write and read at the same time and if one fails that only screws up a portion of my data,not all of it.
should I reconsider?

 

[_UV_]

CONS
single point of failure
PROS
possible better speed (if you consider PCI-E/NVME SSD)
single big drive with 1 partition for a possible single very big app like modern games

 

[Rahnak]

If it ain't broke don't fix it?

Personally I'd prefer to have a single, bigger drive as that would let me keep all my stuff in a single place (also a very slight boost in performance for some drives). Also lower power consumption and less physical space taken (which isn't an issue for you).

Also when SSDs fail doesn't it still let you read the data but not write? Unless it's some spectacular fail (Luckily never had any kind of drive fail on me, so I honestly don't know).

 

[bonehead123]

I would sell them all, get a new 4TB (or 2x 2TB) for your games, and a 256/512GB for your OS and be done with it.

If your mobo supports it, I would make that OS drive an nvme drive, as their prices (and all SSD's in general) are dropping like crazy right now

FYI, I saw a 500gb WD Black SN750 nvme with a 2TB spinner somewhere for ~$100 last week...

 

[R0H1T]

Yes larger capacities are better but looking at your setup you should keep some of the 500GB drives, even if just for backup.

 

[bug]

It really depends. I expect many people have multi-SSD setups because, like me, they upgraded some of their storage as SSDs got cheaper.
A multi SSD setup allows you to use a bottom of the barrel, dirt cheap QLC drive for stuff like video or audio that you mostly never write. In my case, having Linux on a separate drive meant I didn't have to worry about Windows' nasty habit of taking over the boot sector.
But there's nothing inherently wrong with a single SSD setup either.

 

[Vayra86]

1. Capacities under 256GB are detrimental to performance
2. Filling up an SSD to near-capacity slows it down

Based on that I would toss out the 128/256GB SSDs and replace them with a single large one if you want to burn money. If you're sensible about it, just wait until they start complaining.

These are non issues for regular use. In a general sense, bigger is better for SSDs (more options for the controller to move data around and use wear levelling properly). Too big however tends to bring a cost aspect (I believe 2TB is still higher $/GB for many brands) but has the advantage of taking up less space/SATA/NVME.

Apart from the speed considerations its all common sense really, if you ask me. About the single point of failure... meh. This is why you make backups anyway of important stuff. Two SSDs can fail too.

 

[R0H1T]

If you're sensible about it, just wait until they start complaining.

I seriously doubt that.

 

[cucker tarlson]

1. Capacities under 256GB are detrimental to performance
2. Filling up an SSD to near-capacity slows it down

Based on that I would toss out the 128/256GB SSDs and replace them with a single large one if you want to burn money. If you're sensible about it, just wait until they start complaining.

These are non issues for regular use. In a general sense, bigger is better for SSDs (more options for the controller to move data around and use wear levelling properly). Too big however tends to bring a cost aspect (I believe 2TB is still higher $/GB for many brands) but has the advantage of taking up less space/SATA/NVME.

Apart from the speed considerations its all common sense really, if you ask me. About the single point of failure... meh. This is why you make backups anyway of important stuff. Two SSDs can fail too.

I don't fill them up to the max.On 256gb ones I found that you really have to fill them up to almost max to see real slowdowns.I leave +30 free on each of them so no worries.They're 850pro's too so 3d mlc doesn't give up as easily as tlc on cheaper 250gb drives.

the 128gb one works great as well,but it's only ever about half full.it's 3d mlc as well,I'm getting as good sequential/random performance as people are gettng on bigger 3d tlc drives.Only thing it sucks at is high thread/high queue workloads,which are non-exsitent on my rig.I wouldn't buy a 128/256 drive on tlc,I know better than that

I don't have any problem with capacity,got hundreds of gigabytes free atm (552gb free across all drives),rather the pros and cons of single vs multi.

I gotta admit I'm a bit of a ssd whore too.I like having many and benching them.I like having quality ones on 3d mlc too,even if I have to sacrifice the capacity.

 

[bug]

The only reason to change your setup would be if you went for NMVe drives, because motherboards don't have nearly the same number of M.2 connectors as they do SATA. I almost forgot about that.
But otherwise, don't worry about it.

 

[R0H1T]

With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.

 

[bug]

With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.

Unfortunately, as NVMe catches on, we'll all be limited by the number of available PCIe lanes
Still, the point of NVMe isn't about the high sequential speeds (you rarely need those), but the lower protocaol overhead that lets you do more small reads per second. And you can benefit from that even if you run the drive on a couple of PCIe lanes.

 

[cucker tarlson]

With the 5775c he'll be limited by PCIe lanes more than anything else.

I can go with a pci-e one that'll be limited to 2.0 x4.
Not really a problem since this only affects sequential transfers,which frankly is the last thing we do on home/gaming rigs.

pci-e 2.0 can do +1700mb/s

 

[Ruyki]

I've always thought having more smaller drives is better since the drives don't have to write and read at the same time and if one fails that only screws up a portion of my data,not all of it.
should I reconsider?

Reading and writing to a multiple SSDs can probably be faster that a single SSD. But for most normal uses a single large SSD should be plenty fast since SSDs are good at doing multiple things at a time anyway.

I say one big SSD or many small SSDs are both ok so you're fine.

But I would not recommended getting multiple SSDs in case you're just building a new system or adding SSD storage to a system that has none. In this case, you're probably better off getting one large SSD.

The biggest advantage of having less bigger drives than more smaller ones is having free case spots and SATA connectors for future upgrades.

 

[trog100]

leave your drives as they are and find another way to spend your money..

trog

ps.. i just spent £200 quid on a evo 970 plus nvme 1 T drive 3500 read 3500 write.. Division 2 still takes an eternity to load from it.. he he..

 

[Bones]

I can only speak for what I've done before - I have used a pair of SSD's in RAID 0 and had another drive as a data drive for things like game installs. Used the RAID setup for the OS itself and that did improve overall performance in how quickly it executed programs and the like but for things like loading games from the other drive I don't recall it making a real difference, perhaps a little but certainly nothing to write home about.

I do agree having everything based on a single drive creates a single point of failure, that much is certain. For all the drives the OP has, doing a RAID 0 setup at least shoudn't be much of a problem with the 2x850 pro 256gb drives with all the rest used as extra drives for whatever else - Would also depend if his board supports RAID and I don't see why it woudn't.
Only real con(s) is the usual with a RAID setup that we all know about.

For m.2 stuff I have nothing for that since I don't use those kind of drives.

 

[cucker tarlson]

leave your drives as they are and find another way to spend your money..

trog

ps.. i just spent £200 quid on a evo 970 plus nvme 1 T drive 3500 read 3500 write.. Division 2 still takes an eternity to load from it.. he he..

cause nvme does dick to loading times.you could take a cheap ass sata ssd and loading times would be the same.

I can only speak for what I've done before - I have used a pair of SSD's in RAID 0 and had another drive as a data drive for things like game installs. Used the RAID setup for the OS itself and that did improve overall performance in how quickly it executed programs and the like but for things like loading games from the other drive I don't recall it making a real difference, perhaps a little but certainly nothing to write home about.

I do agree having everything based on a single drive creates a single point of failure, that much is certain. For all the drives the OP has, doing a RAID 0 setup at least shoudn't be much of a problem with the 2x850 pro 256gb drives with all the rest used as extra drives for whatever else - Would also depend if his board supports RAID and I don't see why it woudn't.
Only real con(s) is the usual with a RAID setup that we all know about.

For m.2 stuff I have nothing for that since I don't use those kind of drives.

I did have them in raid.sequential r/w were over 1000mb/s and high queue speeds improvd by 40% iirc,but where it actualy matters,it improved absolutely nothing.

 

[delshay]

I started off with 512MB, then I moved to 1TB, but now on 2TB, all Samsung 850 pro. I moved to the larger disk space as I noticed AAA games tended to be getting bigger in size over time.

Also Samsung disk has a larger cache memory as you go up in disk space, ie my 2TB 850 pro has 2GB LPDDR3. My next update will most likely be the newer 860 pro either 2TB or 4TB.

 

[bug]

@Bones Raid is probably the worst thing you can do to a SSD. It only improves sequential transfers and you have NMVe for that. If you want better reads/writes, you need to go RAID0 and then you're more susceptible to drive failures. If you do it like you did and only keep the OS and apps on the raid array, then yes, there's nothing there to lose. But otherwise just no.

 

[Bones]

Thanks - Since I did mention it I did a little digging around for those that may be curious about it anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

 

[Vayra86]

People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.

 

[bug]

People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.

That is true. There was a chart illustrating how little difference is there between SSDs compared to HDDs, but Idk if I can dig it up again.
Still, for more intensive usage, the better 4k random reads of NVMe won't hurt

 

[cucker tarlson]

People tend to forget that the amount of times storage is a limiting factor in responsiveness or speed is incredibly limited and for commercial use barely even exists apart from boot and load times. And even then, with a regular SSD you're already looking at other bottlenecks such as the CPU. That is part of the reason SATA > NVME barely pays off.

I think that nvme doesn't really help with the bottlenecks that hamper sata ssd perfromance in the first place,or at least they don't help with most of them.the reason why a sata ssd can't load every game level in 1 second but instead takes 10-20 seconds is not that it's lacking sequential read performance.
nvme ssd should be purchased if you're gonna use sequential r/w speed on a regular basis.that's it.

 

[Vayra86]

That is true. There was a chart illustrating how little difference is there between SSDs compared to HDDs, but Idk if I can dig it up again.
Still, for more intensive usage, the better 4k random reads of NVMe won't hurt

Meh, Price/GB is still a bit too far off from the SATA alternative iMO. 1,5x the price is just too much for a negligible perf boost. Nothing hurts more than an empty wallet I feel a LOT better spending that money on killing off everything mechanical HDD in my rig first. I do actually notice the spin-up time now, its annoying and noisy

We are spoiled.

 

[bug]

Meh, Price/GB is still a bit too far off from the SATA alternative iMO. 1,5x the price is just too much for a negligible perf boost. Nothing hurts more than an empty wallet I feel a LOT better spending that money on killing off everything mechanical HDD in my rig first. I do actually notice the spin-up time now, its annoying and noisy

We are spoiled.

As proof I don't disagree with you, check out my system specs