[Ekke]

Will I see a performance gain using 2x60GB Corsair Force 3A vs 1x128GB SSD.

The 128GB SSDs could be either of these:

Corsair Force 3
Crucial m4
Samsung 830
OCZ Octane 128GB.

SATA2 will limit the one drive sequential performance, but I will have TRIM using one drive.
Using raid0 will gain me more seq and iops, but I will loose TRIM.

What do you think I should choose?

General system is i7 920 3.0Ghz 18GB ram.

This post has been edited by Ekke: 08 February 2012 - 12:34 PM

[Kevin OBrien]

I would personally go with a single 120GB drive. On the RAID0 side you really see larger performance gains pairing up larger capacity models. On the SF side you see performance hits on 480GB models performing under a single 240, meaning two 240GB drives would perform significantly faster than a single 480. As you move lower though many of the small capacity drives have severe write-limits, so RAID0'ing two 60GB drives might only bring it up to parity with a 120GB model and you still lose out on TRIM until Intel works it into later software builds.

[Brian]

Plus you introduce more failure risk, I'd be inclined to go 120GB as well.

[continuum]

Write speeds on the smaller models really suffers, I would definitely go with a single 120GB over two 60GB.

[Ekke]

Brian, on 08 February 2012 - 06:13 PM, said:

Plus you introduce more failure risk, I'd be inclined to go 120GB as well.

According to the specs the write speed isnt that bad on the Force 3 60GB

550 MB/s sequential read
490 MB/s sequential write
Max Random 4k Write (using IOMeter 08): 80k IOPS

And I'm still limited to sata2 ~ 200 - 250 MBps.

Are you really sure that two of these drivers wont be fast enough to justify raid?

[Brian]

I just don't see any practical benefit in doing two drives in RAID0 in your system. I'd rather not have the failure risk. Plus, you're not going to "feel" any performance gains with RAID0 with your hardware.

[rugger]

Ekke, on 10 February 2012 - 10:47 AM, said:

According to the specs the write speed isnt that bad on the Force 3 60GB

550 MB/s sequential read
490 MB/s sequential write
Max Random 4k Write (using IOMeter 08): 80k IOPS

And I'm still limited to sata2 ~ 200 - 250 MBps.

Are you really sure that two of these drivers wont be fast enough to justify raid?

This is only for highly compressible loads (0x00 fill in crystaldiskmark for example).

On more normal loads, the 60gig Sandforce drives using async NAND (cheap ones) are more like 200meg per sec read and 65meg per second write (sequential).

Still a fast drive, but you really are better off going with a single 120gig drive.

[Ekke]

I bought a Samsung 830 120GB. But I'm still onvinved that the raid solution would have given slightly more theoretical performance due to more iops.
But I would never have noticed it, so I went with a single reliable drive instead.