1 SSD or 2 SSD RAID-0

In preparation for Windows 10 I plan on completely resetting my hard drive configuration since I currently have it spanning four hard drives. Right now my OS sits on a 128GB SSD while all the programs, games, photos, family videos, etc. sit on a mechanical 1TB drive.

I want to upgrade to, at the very least, a 500GB SSD but am considering a 1TB. The thing is I can get two 500GB for $320 vs the $380 for a 1TB so I could create a RAID-0. In reading up on this though a lot of people advise against it because if one of the drives goes down then data on both are lost. However, I'm not sure how this is any different if I got a 1TB drive. If everything was housed on that drive and it crapped out then all the data would be lost there too.

I should note that all my important files, docs/photos/family videos are going to be backed up to OneDrive so if the drive does go out this data won't be lost permanently.

With that in mind is there really a reason not to do 2 SSD in a RAID-0 config and save myself $60?

RAID-0 will be faster, but doubles the chance of a failure. However, I've been running 2 120gb SSDs in RAID-0 for several years without any failure.

I build all my personal machines so that the OS drive can fail without losing anything important. If you're really concerned about disaster recovery, just make sure you backup your files to the cloud like you said you're going to, and continue keeping them on a separate drive from your RAID. As I've seen, spinning disks are just as much or more likely to die than SSDs so there's no guarantee your storage drive is any more secure than your raid.

I recommend the Samsung EVO 850 3D drives. They're the best I've used for the money.

pengland said:

I recommend the Samsung EVO 850 3D drives. They're the best I've used for the money.

That's the one I'm looking at. Thanks!

Where can you find a 1TB Evo 850 for $380... was that a typo? Did you mean $580?

The difference between 1 drive and 2 drives in RAID-0 is that in RAID-0 you have 2x the chance of losing your data. Imagine, for the sake of illustration, that a drive fails 1 out of 10 times. That means there's a 10% chance of failure. If you had two drives, in RAID-0 (which is striped) then there's a 2 out of 10 times chance of failure, or 20%. This is because if either drive fails, you lose all your data due to the interleaving of the sectors.

Still, unless there's a power surge or static discharge, it's unlikely for this to happen. And that's likely to affect all SSD's in the system anyways. SSD's these days don't have the failure rates they used to from write cycles. They now last 5+ years with heavy usage.

I have, however, had power supplies blow up on me and fry all the electronics in physical drives as well, so even mirroring isn't a replacement for a backup.

Mystere said:

Where can you find a 1TB Evo 850 for $380... was that a typo? Did you mean $580?

Amazon.

thunderclap said:

Amazon.

Or $389 (free shipping) at Newegg.

This article is quite dated (2007, pre-SSD), but I still suggest giving it a look:

Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea - Puget Custom Computers

The title is misleading, as the article isn't that strongly negative about RAID. My own experience was with a 4 disk (spinner) RAID 10 array, using the motherboard's Intel controller. The array would re-verify itself after a Windows bluescreen. That took hours. The machine was still usable while that was going on, but disk access was seriously degraded. That's not very relevant to RAID 0, but...

If you want good SSD benchmark numbers, go with a PCI-E drive. NVME, for maximum geek appeal. (It's only money.)

More seriously: my choice would be the single 1TB drive. If your MB had an mSATA slot, (it doesn't, if it's the ASRock Z77 Extreme4) I'd go with that, for less than $10 more.

I just found a seller that had new 500TB ones for $150. I don't think I'm going to find a better price so I sprung for 2. I still have a little time to decide if I'll RAID it or keep it as two drives with one housing games and the other the OS, docs, photos, and videos.