I just stumbled across these, which, with the mail in rebate, seems like a pretty sweet deal. Reviews seem relatively solid as well. (In order to get the full mail in rebate for both drives I'd have to get a coworker to order one for me, but that is a minor technicality). It got me thinking though - how much of a performance boost would a pair of SSDs in raid0 give over a standard hard drive? Does anyone here actually have an SSD (raided or otherwise)? How do you like it? Is it worth buying in now or should a person wait a little while longer for further price drops?

SSD reads fast but writes slow.

Also, on SSD you can only write each byte so many times before it dies (10,000 times i think) so you wouldnt want to use it for something where a lot of data was getting written often.

SSD is great for some uses, but it would be a bad idea to throw out your HDD's and replaces with SSD's :P

Although smart use of them could make a lot of things a lot faster for you (:

I'm certainly not going to throw away my regular hard drives - I'm keeping them for the main data storage (pictures, video, etc). The SSDs would be for the OS and a few programs (Office, Visual Studio, maybe a few games).

as current technology is SSD's aren't worth the money. Sure they're fast but unless your restricting them to access only media such as Video files they aren't worth it, Even 2 caviar blacks will give better resuls and have a lot longer life span. let alone cost the same as one of those SSD's with 19-11 times the space

I own one of "these" (the ancestor of the one you linked to) and they are very well worth their money. Write speed is approximately equal to hard disk for bulk writes, but random write access time can be up to twice as much.
Read access time is well under 1ms and transfer is upwards of 80 MB/s in the worst case, and 120-140 MB/s in the average case.

So, if someone tells you they're not worth their money, I'm afraid to say they just don't know. Of course the swapfile is not something to put on a SSD, but for many other things, they are big, big, big win.
For example, compiling runs roughly twice as fast (wall time) if the compiler, all headers, and libraries are on SSD, disk IO being the only real bottleneck nowadays.

Quote: Original post by freeworld
as current technology is SSD's aren't worth the money. Sure they're fast but unless your restricting them to access only media such as Video files they aren't worth it, Even 2 caviar blacks will give better resuls and have a lot longer life span. let alone cost the same as one of those SSD's with 19-11 times the space

I think you misunderstood me - I wouldn't plan on using the SSDs for media - I'm planning on using regular platter based drives for that.

Quote: Original post by samoth
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I'm glad to hear that you have had a positive experience with them. Apparently now the deal is sold out, but I have had my eye on a single Intel SSD - one of the new 32 nm based ones. I'm not sure they are shipping yet (there was an issue with setting a password on the bios or something that screwed them up, so they stopped shipping them for a while, at least until a firmware patch is/was made available).

Quote: Original post by Moe

Quote: Original post by freeworld
as current technology is SSD's aren't worth the money. Sure they're fast but unless your restricting them to access only media such as Video files they aren't worth it, Even 2 caviar blacks will give better resuls and have a lot longer life span. let alone cost the same as one of those SSD's with 19-11 times the space

I think you misunderstood me - I wouldn't plan on using the SSDs for media - I'm planning on using regular platter based drives for that.

That is exactly freeworld's point - SSDs are intended for media, where read/write performance is paramount, and you very rarely are rewriting small files. If you instead try to use your SSDs as swap space, they will wear out in very short order.

Quote: Original post by samoth
I own one of "these" (the ancestor of the one you linked to) and they are very well worth their money. Write speed is approximately equal to hard disk for bulk writes, but random write access time can be up to twice as much.
Read access time is well under 1ms and transfer is upwards of 80 MB/s in the worst case, and 120-140 MB/s in the average case.

If you act quickly, they might be willing to refund your money [wink]

Ok, I am being a little facetious, but my 'el cheapo' 7200 RPM Western Digital sustains a solid 125 MB/s, which means that at the price you paid for that SSD, you were raped.

Quote: Original post by swiftcoder
Ok, I am being a little facetious, but my 'el cheapo' 7200 RPM Western Digital sustains a solid 125 MB/s, which means that at the price you paid for that SSD, you were raped.

I didn't order one - I was thinking about it.

For me it isn't about sustained high transfer rates, it's the random access times in something like an operating system that are the bottleneck. Most everyone I've heard of is using them for an OS drive and a traditional hard drive for bulk data storage where seek times don't matter as much.

Quote: Original post by Moe
For me it isn't about sustained high transfer rates, it's the random access times in something like an operating system that are the bottleneck. Most everyone I've heard of is using them for an OS drive and a traditional hard drive for bulk data storage where seek times don't matter as much.

In that case, you might want to look into investing that cash in another 4 GB of RAM, and running your OS out of a ram-disk. I realise that the setup could be a little tricky for Mac or Windows, but it should be pretty simple on linux.

However, I will say that I have never found the seek time to badly affect the speed of my operating system. On a modern machine your biggest bottleneck should be transfer to and from the swap file (adding more RAM and reducing the size of the swap file can alleviate).

And since you primarily want to reduce seek times, I am not sure I see what you expect putting SSDs in RAID to help with. The idea behind RAID 0 is to allow one disk to seek while the other reads - but SSDs low seek times are likely to nullify much of the gain in this area.