What's fastest? RAID 0 or two separate 6 G/s controllers?

[simmerhead 885]

Hei. I am wondering what would be fastest of these two alternatives:1) Two SSDs in Raid 0 configuration or2) Two SSDs with no RAID attatched to two separate 6 G/s controllers.I have a Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z MB with both Intel and Marvel 6 G/s controllers.The reason I'm asking is that I use a very heavy Flight Simulator setup with over 300GB worth of files and I am wondering if reading system/aircraft files from one SSD and scenery from another would improve performance over having it all on one RAID 0 volume.Thanks!

[tutmeister 710]

From all accounts, SSDs in RAID0 are faster than single SSDs according to various benchmarks; however, using hardware controllers may mean your TRIM command won't work, which then shortens the life of the SSD. As you're looking at two very expensive SSDs to fit all that content on (300GB of data would set you back at least $500 for each SSD that could fit that much data at current prices, so $1000 for 2 in RAID0!), I'd avoid shortening the life of the SSD. So I'd recommend using them separately and going with your idea of separating the scenery from the rest of the FS install.If you're going to buy both anyway, there is nothing stopping you from benchmarking them in RAID0 and again separately on their individual SATA 6Gbit/s controllers (just add the two singles together against the one score of the RAID0). That would at least satisfy your theory. One of my theories on this topic though, is that a bottleneck elsewhere in the system that can be caused when entering an area with a lot of activity reverberates down to the hard drive causing, momentarily a micro-stutter. Now if your SSD was in RAID0, that stutter would affect all parts of FS while flying, but if you'd separated the install as you suggested, I'd suggest that the effect of the micro-stutter would be shared by both hard drives to a certain degree and thus having the scenery seperated from the rest of the install may be the better option in terms of performance. Of course, the above is but a theory and I have not tested it (yet).

[Illegitimi non carborundum 4]

Just a thought but wouldn't it be faster with a SSD on a dedicated PCIe card which would give phenomenal speed and remove all the disadvantages of RAID and the SATA bus.RegardsPeterH

[simmerhead 885]

Thanks for your kind replies. I'm sure a dedicated PCIe card would be fast, but I have no room for it...