Raid failure, SSD now?

In a prior thread I posted that I had, in screwing around and not taking things seriously, used a WD black and a WD green in striped Raid on the computer which my wife now uses for our accounting and business. It has consistently given the errors due to the delayed spinup or whatever, but to no actual ill effect. Now, the computer will go completely blank suddenly and this has happened a couple of times a day at random. Error frequency has also increased.

I think it's time for a rebuild on the system. The one thing she does not have is time, so I was considering throwing an SSD in there and using the black as the storage. But, being businesspeople, we do not want to invest in something and not realize a full return on investment. And we do not want to throw money at a problem. I saw the Crucial SSDs are very highly rated and clock out at amazing speeds at harddrivebenchmarks.net.

My question is whether 64GB will suffice for her needs. Her main use is Mozilla and MS Money 2004. That's it. I want those to be run on the main SSD and not from a HD. I have both Win7 x64 Pro and Home Premium. I don't think we really use the features in Pro and can't tell the difference, so whichever is smaller I think I would use. (Any ideas which is smaller install?)

Finally, investing 100-200 dollars and still having it blank out will have her kill me. So does that seem like an issue caused by a f-d up raid array? (It's on the AMD raid chipset) Computer info listed in my sig, the Phenomn II system.

Thanks!!!

having a WD black and a WD green in a raid 0 array will most definitely cause problems or at least increase the potential for future problems. those drives are nearly at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of performance of modern hard drives. when it comes to SSD size requirements for what your wife does, it sounds like she would be fine using that as her primary OS/program drive with one of the others for data storage.

from what i understand, the installation size of win7 pro vs home is going to be nearly identical but i would imagine that home would have more of a possibility to be smaller due to fewer options actually being installed.

basically, i would get that data off of the raid array asap as the probability of a drive dropping out of the raid 0 array is fairly high and then you may be out of luck.

I don't think there is a noticeable difference between Pro and Home Premium. 64gb should be fine for what you need it to do.

By the way, the array was failing because of TLER.

Yah, TLER, that's it. Luckily I have her backing up daily and we keep most stuff directly on a NAS anyways. All I want on the new system is Win7, Office, Mozilla, and MS Expression Studio.

Do I need to do anything to ensure we don't eat up 10GB in Swap/Page/Hiberfil when I load Win7?

You can disable those after you install the operating system, not an issue.

So I can fix the problem by just disabling TLER on the WD raid?

McGrace said:

So I can fix the problem by just disabling TLER on the WD raid?

Click to expand...

You can't disable TLER.

To save money you can just use the Black drive for OS and local storage. You already have a NAS for backups.

The Black by itself should be plenty fast for her needs, and you can sell the Green drive or add it to your NAS.

If she still wants more speed go for the SSD, but since this is for business I have to recommend sticking w/ a tried and true traditional HDD...and no RAID0! I have an SSD, but I've already had an incident where the SSD became unbootable after only a month of use. A Secure Erase fixed it, but their reliability is still in question in my mind. Plus, there is all this new 25nm NAND problems w/ SSD drives...best to wait out the storm IMO.