Hard drives with built in SSD's in raid 0 in laptop?

I remember seeing that either Seagate's or some manufacturer's hard drives that included an on board SSD were causing problems in laptop's.

I want to put 2 of these WD Black² Dual Drive 2.5" 120 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD Kit's in my hard drive bays on an Alienware M17xR4 in Raid 0.

Will they work?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236642

 

These are the most inflated marketing gimmick. I've tried them, they are no where near the snapiness and speed of a full fledged SSD

 

I don't plan on booting from them, my boot drive is the Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1TB mSATA.

I need more space than the dual Western Digital Black Edition 750gb hard drives are providing. I saw these 1TB black edition drives with the built in SSD. I want 2TB in raid 0 on the laptop.

Will this work, or because they have the built in SSD on each hard drive will they fail in Raid 0?

 

Hi there M17XR42012!

I wouldn't recommend to setup a RAID array with 2 Black Dual drives because of the design of the product - RAID will either not work, or it will have issues.

Instead, since you're looking for 2.5 drives to setup in your laptop, you can take a look at WD Red - they are meant for NAS and RAID usage, and have the necessary build-in features for this like low operating temperature, 24/7 operational, TLER, which helps the drive recover faster in case of read/write error and the drive doesn’t drop off the RAID, NASware 3.0 etc. Here's a link if you want to check them out:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=m09H6r

Feel free to ask if you happen to have any questions and cheers!

 

I had the Black² in my main desktop and it seemed about as good as any other SSD, but the Black² is an odd duck. When you install Windows it sees it as one drive, then you install the WD software, which separates the drives. I can't see that working in RAID, but I'm certainly no expert.

 

Ahh in that case it's fine, I thought you wanted to get them thinking they would get you some magical performance. As a storage drive they're great but I wouldn't RAID them personally as the way they work is cache the most used data to the SSD portion of the drive. I have no idea how technically this would be done when RAIDing 2 drives but I would try it if I were you.

 

Agreed, I wouldn't RAID them either. If you wanted to RAID hybrid drives, I'd go for for a more traditional hybrid design where the SSD portion is used to cache the most frequently used data. Even then, I don't really see any point to using any kind of hybrid drives for what is mostly data storage. Hech, get two Hitachi 7.2K RPM 1 TB drives, RAID em and call it a day ot RAID two 1.5 GB 5.4K RPM is you thing you'll need even more storage space.

 

Right, I am mainly looking for storage out of these two drives and only want 1 drive letter instead of 2 separate drives, hence raid 0.

But I don't want them to be slow either, which in my experience Western Digital Red drives are slow.

And there is also the option of putting 2 Samsung EVO 850 Pro's in the laptop, but I am not convinced that would be the best for storage and it would be over priced.

Are their options for larger drives (over 1TB) remember that I am working with a 9.5mm max hard drive height, which in an Alienware laptop seems kinda funny.

They should support 12.5mm 2.5 inch drives.

 

There is a 2tb 9.5mm hdd. Also wd red drives are designed for NAS storage for durability and longevity not for speed.

 

Don't bother RAID'ing mechanical drives. This even goes for hybrid drives, which mostly behave like mechanical drives because their cache (4GB - 8GB) is so small.

You obviously want high performance and high storage capacity. The right way to do this is to get an SSD, and a mechanical HDD. Get a 500GB SSD for speed, and a 1TB - 2TB 2.5" mechanical HDD for bulk storage. Put your OS / games / apps on the SSD, and put your "bulk storage" media (pics, music, videos, pr0n, etc) on the 2TB mechanical HDD. If single-drive-letter is really that important to you, then use Windows 8.1 and mount your mechanical HDD as a folder on C:\ (rather than as a separate drive letter).



But won't some lousy 5400rpm 2TB mechanical HDD be slow? I want SPEED!
Remember, you're putting your bulk media on the mechanical HDD. And for bulk media, speed doesn't matter. An MP3 music file or 4GB MKV BluRay rip movie will play back equally well on a 5400rpm drive as it will on the fastest SSD storage. There are actually benefits of using 5400rpm mechanical HDDs for this purpose. They will draw less power, which means less noise, heat, and more battery life.



What about the WD Black^2?
That is a 1TB HDD + 128GB SSD in the same 2.5" SATA package. It isn't a hybrid drive. I'm not even sure you can RAID them, given the unusual configuration of the drive controller on the WD Black^2 that was necessary to have two separate addressable storage spaces in a single SATA connector.

And even if you were to just buy one of them, you still don't want it. The 128GB SSD portion is slow, and the drive is wicked expensive for what you get.

 

Kent,

I am booting from an mSATA, so the OS and Applications are fine. This is for the other 2 physical drive bays in the laptop.

Right, I did say I want them for storage, but I will be editing 4k and 6k video in real time in software like Adobe Premiere, so this is storage in the sense or I need large amounts of space at high speeds until a project is completed.

Permanent storage of the finished product gets put on a 24 bay NAS.

 

My mistake. I should probably do a better job reading the thread before opening my mouth

In any case, I don't think that hybrid hard drives are right for you. The WD Black^2's use the 128GB SSD as a separate mountable drive volume, and not as some kind of cache. And even the true hybrid hard drives only have 4GB of 8GB of cache for the most commonly accessed content, which won't really come into play for large sequential video editing.

Are you price-limited to the point where you need to go with HDDs, or can you afford SSD storage (even inexpensive SSD storage, like 850 EVos (not pros))?

 

Right. The Black² fits a niche market where you have only a single 2.5" drive bay free, so you can have the speed of SSD for OS and common apps and mass storage for everything else on HDD>

 

I guess puting Evo 850's in the 2 bays would be the way to go. I might wait for the 2TB Evo 850's come out to put 2 of them in because of price if I am going to spend $1000+ for 2 drives.

 

2TB SSDs will cost a pretty penny.

It's totally up to you... but I'd say that you don't need to go balls-to-the-wall 110% maxed out right away on this. You could buy a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO now, and use it until it fills up to buy yourself some time for either 2TB drives to come out, or 2TB drives to drop in price.

Now, that 1TB 850 EVO isn't going to go to waste. It will retain its utility for quite some time. You could add another 1TB 850 EVO in your system; You could take that 850 EVO out and put it into another system; You could give it to a friend; You could stick it in an external USB 3.0 / 3.1 enclosure and use it as external storage down the road (either as standalone drive or paired with another 850 EVO in RAID-0).

 

You could always get cheaper Crucial M550 SSD's but they don't exactly run cool.. The 1TB/2TB Evos will kill your wallet!

 

There's a 2TB EVO?!

 

Well Samsung hinted at it at CES or something but said there was no market for consumer 2TB SSD's so they were not going to bring it to market..... which is sad.

 

No market? Where did you read/hear this exactly? There'd be a huge market for such a device.