Best HD Setup for performance

[surfsk8snow.jah]

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

Config 1) 1x Vertex 3 120GB Boot Drive + 1x Vertex 3 120Gb drive running other applications such as games, MS office, AutoCAD, etc.

Config 2) 2x Vertex 3 120GB 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 concurrently 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, 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?

 

[AhokZYashA]

for performance clearly use the second option,
but for the life of your SSD,
use the first option, it should be fast enough

 

[Hotobu]

Unless I'm missing something neither of these really makes any sense.

I don't get what you're trying to achieve with #1, and don't see any benefit to #2.

As far as I know the only benefit of RAID0 outside of combining size is in sustained reads and writes, but a SATA III SSD is going to pretty much saturate SATA III bandwidth anyway, so the only thing you "get" is the loss of trim.

...Why not go with the obvious #3 and buy a 240 GB SSD?

 

[surfsk8snow.jah]

As far as I know the only benefit of RAID0 outside of combining size is in sustained reads and writes, but a SATA III SSD is going to pretty much saturate SATA III bandwidth anyway, so the only thing you "get" is the loss of trim.

...Why not go with the obvious #3 and buy a 240 GB SSD?

a Single SATA III SSD does not fully saturate 6.0Gbps yet, adding to the fact that when you have two running in parallel, you're not limited by one 'pathway,' you get X*6.0Gbps, where X is the number of RAID discs you in 0.
For a legitimization of RAID SSDs, check out this article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3618/intel-x25v-in-raid0-faster-than-x25m-g2-for-250

Additionally, just throw into Google "Raid 0 Vertex 3" and you'll get some benchmarks from numerous people showing >1000MB/s Sequential Read speed, >300MB/s Sequential Write Speed (http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2158499 is one example, http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...-0-2*120-Vertex-3-Max-IOPS-on-Eurocom-Neptune is another example).

And why buy 1x240GB when you can buy 2x120GB=240GB with twice the performance?

And in regards to TRIM, my research is continuing to point to the newly optimized Garbage Collection on the newer SandForce controllers, especially if you leave your computer on idle for any medium amount of time each week, making the need for TRIM much less significant. That said, I do still wish RAID controllers would just step it up 3 years into things and code a controller that passes TRIM from the OS, as it is still more efficient that the best GC.

 

[scaminatrix]

Meh just buy one 120GB SDD and install OS + favourite games on there and then buy 2 or 3 HDD's (not SSD's) and then RAID them for other stuff. That's what I would do anyway, and looking at other people's System Specs on this site, a lot of other people do too.