Thought I'd start a new one as I'm finally going SSD

[MongGrel]

Finally making the jump just to get the upgrade bug over here.

I'm gonna try this out for grins and giggles if nothing else I can reconfigure things later and get these old Raptors out of here that are just taking up space.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m1132X509988X45ca2f053820976361e6f57d1dbef828

with this old thing

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Page=4#scrollFullInfo

with two of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...m1132X509988X7d916e116f7bdb7920d918ed533177e4

and try out them in the HyperDuo for starters.

http://www.marvell.com/storage/system-solutions/sata-controllers/hyperduo/

If the Tech brief is at least half true there, might work almost as well as two stand alone SSD's with a lot more storage, have to see.

My HDD's are horrible, worse thing in the system, at least will give me some room to play around a bit and get the upgrade bug out of my system awhile

That and just finally rip these old Raptors out of here.

 

[MongGrel]

Any comments one way or the other ???

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

You would be better off to get a single 250GB SSD rather than two 120GB SSDs. Besides being cheaper, I don't think you can cache two SSDs to one HDD. And it wouldn't be that much more expensive overall to just get a 500GB SSD and be done with it. You will be happier with the performance.

Keep in mind that caching with a SSD will never be as fast as an actual SSD and may not improve boot and loading times all that much or even not at all, depending on your computing habits.

If most of what is going on the drive is just data, you would be much, much better off getting a separate SSD for your OS and programs and replacing that old HDD with one of the newer and faster HDDs, such as the current WD Blacks. Performance will be much, much better overall and you will be out less money in the long run. For just moving data, SSDs aren't that much faster than current HDDs. Where HDDs shine is booting the OS and opening programs. The size of the SSD would depend mostly upon the size of the programs. 120-128GB would be plenty for most people although some gamers may need 250-256GB or even 500-512GB if they has very many really huge games.

Also keep in mind that an HBA, RAID, or other card like the one you are considering will actually add to your boot time because it will have to load its own BIOS. I have an LSI 9211-8i HBA card on my machine I put in because I needed eight additional SATA ports. When booting up the machine, the UEFI first starts to boot, then gets interrupted so the BIOS for the HBA card can boot, then the UEFI finishes booting, all before Win 7 gets to start booting. It added roughly 10-15 seconds to my boot time. It's not a problem for me since my machine runs 24/7 and I reboot, on average, only once a week or so, but most people would find that intolerable.

Also, don't fall into the trap of wanting to put more than one SSD in RAID 0. SSDs are fast enough, you aren't likely to gain enough to overcome the time to initialize the RAID. Plus, two drives in RAID 0 are twice as likely to fail prematurely.

 

[MongGrel]

Well I've pushed the button on it all ready and will have to see how things pan out I can always reconfigure things later.

I was trying it out this way to put the two in the RAID setup with the Hyper-Duo on the SATA card along with the SATA 6 Caviar black up there initially.

The tech notes here say you can and was just looking at the results there, I'm going to give it a go anyways and Ill still have two SSD's for a good price at any rate.


http://www.marvell.com/storage/system-solutions/sata-controllers/hyperduo/

Hit the tech notes there and check it out, might be a snow job Ill find out.

Nah I have that Areca 1210 in the sig there that does slow boot down a bit with the 4 X 1TBs for data more or less.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Let us know how it works out.

 

[MongGrel]

I can see where I might be doing things that are a few years out of date, but I'll still give it a go atm and see how this works out, like I was saying it's going to be a lot faster in any configuration atm over just HDD's.

Gives me some room to play around with it a bit.

And yep I will.