single big ssd vs a few smaller ones

[las]

Single SSD over RAID any day for desktop usage. You'll only see longer boot up and sometimes worse performance in random read and write.

 

[cucker tarlson]

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.

spin up is the friggin worst part about hdds.
get a docking station I tell ya.

Single SSD over RAID any day. You'll only see longer start up and sometimes worse performance in random read.

that is not what we're discussing.
but yeah,raid is useless on ssds,at least for regular users.

 

[dirtyferret]

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?

I have a similar set up, two 500GB SSD and 3 256 SSD. None of my SSD are even half full as four have a specific game stores on each one (steam, origin, blizzard, and gog) while the 5th SSD holds the MS windows, MS office, a few apps and drivers. All my important information (family photos, taxes, etc.,) go onto my 1TB passport HDD, USB sticks, and I have several HDDs that I make backups of backups using a docking station.

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.

If there's no problem, why fix it? Once it becomes a problem, just get another SSD. I have scandisk, crucial, and samsung SSDs connected through M.2 NvME & SSD and SATA. When I bench them I get different scores similar to ones in reviews, when I use them in the real world I can't tell the difference between any of them.

 

[Deleted member 50521]

How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?

 

[bug]

How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?

Not the worst thing you can do, but pretty much the biggest waste of space possible.
You can use the second drive for regular backups and it will store more snapshots than a simple RAID. Or if you need a secure solution, get a NAS and set it up in RAID5. You'll have 3+ disks, but only lose the capacity of one

 

[Ruyki]

How about 2 big SSDs in redundancy raid?

Costly but useful if you need high availability.
Not sure if it's worth for a desktop. I guess if you use your desktop to make money and/or it absolutely has to never be not available.

 

[eidairaman1]

256-512GB OS SSD, big HDD or SSD with backups

 

[cucker tarlson]

256-512GB OS SSD, big HDD or SSD with backups

why would I need a 512gb os ssd?

 

[Abaidor]

why would I need a 512gb os ssd?

I use a Samsung 960Pro 512GB but I also install all my Content Creation software on it (Adobe Creative Suite, Office 365, + 1VM with Autodesk Apps)...I still have about 200GB free though but I did not want to fill a 256GB 100%...

I was going to get an Intel 900/905p 480GB as an OS drive that has by far (8X) the best 4K Random Read performance out there but could not justify the price....well maybe in the future. My next SSDs will be 2TB SATA volumes one for Games and the other for storing small files like fonts and vector graphics from my content library...

 

[cucker tarlson]

I only need ssd space for games and os.
I guess it's easier to manage your space on a single drive but I'm not finding it hard manage across six either.

I thought about replacing the hdd in my ultrabook with the su900 I have and then getting a 512gb nvme for os/games.I still have almost 500gb free though.

 

[delshay]

Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.

 

[cucker tarlson]

Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.

question is,does this matter?
ssd acces time is measured in milliseconds
ram acces time is measured in nanoseconds

 

[bug]

Out of curiosity has anyone look at the timings of the of the cache memory on SSD drives. After all they are LPDDR3/4. I don't think there's anything to gain from changing it's setting, but it would be interesting to know what they are set to. Does anyone know if there is any software that can read this.

I don't imagine the timings will make a difference. DRAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. If you're doing something that even remotely approaches the latency of DRAM, you'll run out of cache's capacity in a blink of an eye anyway.

 

[newtekie1]

For me, one big SSD. But then, I have so much stuff that would need to go on it, that the cost would be enormous. That's why I have a 500GB OS SSD, and a 3TB HDD that has a 500GB SSD cache. It works pretty well and gives me all the space I need for installing games. All my games go on the 3TB HDD. I could have got away with a much smaller OS drive, 250GB would be enough, but the 500GB was the same price at the time, so why not.

 

[Vario]

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


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.

NVMe made a huge difference for loading times for FiveM for me. Seems like it was like 5 minute load on my WD10EZEX mechanical HDD, 2 minute load on my Seagate 600 240GB SSD, and 1 minute on my 512MB 970 Pro. I didn't stop watch it but it definitely loads faster. But for most games not a big difference.
I like NVMe a lot and now that the price is about the same between NVMe and SATA, I plan to replace the WD10EZEX with a second NVMe 1TB, probably a PM981.

I like having multiple drives, OS and a few games on one, games and storage on the other. Having one big drive would be putting all my eggs in one basket, I'd want to do backups more frequently if I did that.

 

[delshay]

I don't imagine the timings will make a difference. DRAM is at least an order of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. If you're doing something that even remotely approaches the latency of DRAM, you'll run out of cache's capacity in a blink of an eye anyway.

I have to agree with you on this one, but you have to ask yourself. What was the point of moving from LPDDR3 (850 pro) to LPDDR4 (860 pro).
It must have had some benefit otherwise, why not stick to LPDDR3 in the 860 pro.

 

[cucker tarlson]

I have to agree with you on this one, but you have to ask yourself. What was the point of moving from LPDDR3 (850 pro) to LPDDR4 (860 pro).
It must have had some benefit otherwise, why not stick to LPDDR3.

lower power consumption.samsung is not a company to cut corners on ssds.

 

[delshay]

lower power consumption.samsung is not a company to cut corners on ssds.

Looking at Samsung website seems to show 860 pro has higher power consumption than the 850 Pro. Nothing saved here, not unless i'm reading it incorrectly.

So we must be talking about LPDDR specifically.

 

[bug]

Looking at Samsung website seems to show 860 pro has higher power consumption than the 850 Pro. Nothing saved here, not unless i'm reading it incorrectly.

So we must be talking about LPDDR specifically.

Higher power for the whole package, but DDR4 draws less power than DDR3. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LPDDR#LP-DDR4
Another factor may be related to availability. As the industry moves to the new standard, the old one becomes increasingly harder to come by (and thus more expensive).
I hope this clears things up a bit.

 

[cucker tarlson]

I just did a test to see how my drives are doing
took 20gb of data and copied it accross the drives
what I found out

1.copying and pasting from ssd to ssd is noticeably faster than within the same drive.Up to 2x
2.ssds work on percentages.I had 48gb free on 250gb 850 pro and 44gb free on 850 pro 512gb.Guess which one was faster ? 256gb maintained +450mb/s all the time while 512gb started at +450mb/s and about 1/4th way in it started dropping.Good thing is it still maintaned about 230mb/s
3.su900 128gb using micron's mlc also started at 450mb/s but droped,this time more severely.Micron's 15nm 3d mlc was only good for 100-120mb/s.Still a lot better than qlc drives that drop to 30-40mb/s,but meh anyway.Samsung's 3d mlc was 2x faster when the drive was full.
4.how full the disk is has no impact on read speeds,only write
5.positively surprised by xpg 950u,along with 850 pro's it was the fastest in the file copy test.Compared to 860 evo it was both faster to write to and other disks wrote faster reading from xpg950u.The difference was seconds though.

update: seems like su900 needs manual trim execution.after lanuching trim command in adata toolbox the write speed on su900 128gb was matching the other drives.This is pretty weird and something to look out for if you're a su900 owner.run manual trim regularly.

 

[Aquinus]

@Bones Raid is probably the worst thing you can do to a SSD.

No, constantly writing to an SSD (particularly one that's rather full,) is the worst thing you can do to it.

Also tell that to my >7 year old SSD SATA RAID in RAID-0. It's still going strong after all of these years. Also FWIW, at the time, two 120GBs was considerably cheaper than a single 240 when I bought them, so cost was a motivating factor.

update: seems like su900 needs manual trim execution.after lanuching trim command in adata toolbox the write speed on su900 128gb was matching the other drives.This is pretty weird and something to look out for if you're a su900 owner.run manual trim regularly.

It could depend on the OS as well. Ubuntu does a full TRIM on all of my SSDs every Monday morning unless I explicitly run fstrim myself.

 

[delshay]

AFAIK the only problem I see with a RAID set-up is you can't do a firmware update. A user pointed this out some time ago that samsung software can't see a raid set-up & if you do happen to do a firmware update, which drive will get the update if two or more drives are identical. I don't know if anything has changed in samsung software as this was pointed out a long time ago.

 

[cucker tarlson]

interesting.
samsung's 64-layer 3d tlc on 860 seems faster than 48-layer 3d mlc on 850 pro.
like I mentioned before,850 pro 512gb slows down to 230mb/s when near full (around 7-8% free)
so I took 184gb of data and copied it to my 860 evo that had 184gb free. It maintained 300mb/s till the end like a boss.
for comparison,xpg 950su with micron's 3d tlc saw transfer rates as low as 10mb/s when put to the full drive test though I gotta say the way caching works on xpg950su 480gb you'll not see that until below 30gb free (7%)

what I saw on 860evo was absolutely amazing though.this drive is badass.

I wanna get a toshiba bics drive for comparison,so far I'm really amazed with samsung's 3d tlc performance and disappointed with micron's 3d tlc pefromance,though adata did a very good job with caching.Until that last 7% sx950u is even faster than 860 evo by a whisker!

 

[delshay]

interesting.
samsung's 64-layer 3d tlc on 860 seems faster than 48-layer 3d mlc on 850 pro.
like I mentioned before,850 pro 512gb slows down to 230mb/s when near full (around 7-8% free)
so I took 184gb of data and copied it to my 860 evo that had 184gb free. It maintained 300mb/s till the end like a boss.
for comparison,xpg 950su with micron's 3d tlc saw transfer rates as low as 10mb/s when put to the full drive test though I gotta say the way caching works on xpg950su 480gb you'll not see that until below 30gb free (7%)

what I saw on 860evo was absolutely amazing though.this drive is badass.

I wanna get a toshiba bics drive for comparison,so far I'm really amazed with samsung's 3d tlc performance and disappointed with micron's 3d tlc pefromance,though adata did a very good job with caching.Until that last 7% sx950u is even faster than 860 evo by a whisker!

& there's me thinking most users are streets ahead of my laptop SATA 2

 

[cucker tarlson]

& there's me thinking most users are streets ahead of my laptop SATA 2

View attachment 124164

this is a comptletely different test.all my drives do 550mb/s in this.



I re-did the test on xpg950u,this time I picked bigger files,3-5gb.The improvement was visible.The drive slowed down around 20gb before full,and maintained around 160mb/s.A few momentary slowdows to 50-80mb/s.

Still,samsung's nand proved much,much better.