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TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary
I can get 2 120GB Force 3s for less than the cost of a single 240GB. Is it worth getting the 2 drives and sticking them in RAID 0 or should I just go for the larger drive?

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TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary
I've got an Intel controller and I can handle backups, but I'm not doing anything massively intensive. The price difference is 40 GBP, £285 for the 240 vs. £245 for the 2 120s

TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary
Are 512GB drives faster still, or is there a plateau by then?

TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary

Alereon posted:

Performance drops back down again at the 480/512GB mark for most drives, which is why 240/256GB drives in RAID0 can be a compelling option, especially given their lower cost/GB and official TRIM support for RAID0 on Intel platforms (if you can tolerate the obvious risk of data loss).

Oh, is RAID0 with TRIM available now? Last time I checked was back in the spring and it still wasn't out

EDIT: Hmm, seems like it only works on Panther Point chipsets. Shame

TomWaitsForNoMan fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Aug 26, 2012

TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary
I know that 512GB drives are slower than 256GB drives, but are they noticeably so? If I'm using my SSD for standard OS stuff along with gaming, will I notice a difference in real world use?

EDIT: more specifically I'm comparing the M4 256GB with either the M4 or the 830 512GB. I checked the benchmark comparison tool on Anandtech but I have no idea which measures are most reflective of real-world usage and which are more abstract

TomWaitsForNoMan fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Oct 16, 2012

TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary
What's the best drive to go for with a system that lacks TRIM? I'm hearing conflicting things from the last couple of pages so maybe I'm just being stupid: is it a Sandforce drive like the Intel or would a Samsung 840 pro/850 pro work better? Do Samsung controllers have onboard garbage collection like Sandforce does? Is that even an important factor? Lets assume for the sake of argument that I'm absolutely rolling in cash.

EDITed to flesh out the question a bit

TomWaitsForNoMan fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jul 22, 2014

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TomWaitsForNoMan
May 28, 2003

By Any Means Necessary

Factory Factory posted:

The 840 Pro is not a particularly good drive to run without TRIM, but the 850 Pro is. Sandforce drives are also excellent choices for TRIM-less operation and are significantly cheaper than the 850 Pro. Either way, you want to overprovision the drive - as in, leave 20% of it unpartitioned (so e.g. make a 200 GB partition on a 240 GB drive).

All modern SSDs have garbage collection. It is important, which is why all drives have it, but few drives work well with ONLY garbage collection, without TRIM. Those drives that do are, pretty much, Sandforce drives, the 850 Pro, and the Intel DC S3500.

If you are rolling in cash, then you could also go for an enterprise drive like the Intel DC S3700 or P3700. Enterprise drives have a lot of overprovisioning by default, as well as controllers optimized for workloads where even if there is TRIM, there isn't any time to take advantage of it because writes are constant. But such drives are way overkill for a consumer, with a lot of money going into solving problems that consumers do not have in the first place.

Thanks. I'm not actually looking to buy and I'm def not gonna ever buy an enterprise drive. I was just curious because I was confused about what the situation was these days.

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