How shall I run my system? Single vs RD x2 or RD x3

I have 3 SSDs:

2x850 PRO 1TB + 840 EVO mSATA 1TB that does NOT ever suffer from the slowdown issue of old files like many have as I haven't noticed it.

Now I am currently running in RDx3. Someone here once told me that I am hurting my performance as the IOPS of the 840 EVO mSATA 1TB is much lower than the 1TB 850 PROs but according to my testing, this wasn't the case as I got higher scores in RDx3 vs RDx2 also in the IOPS

My workflow is surfing the net and playing some games sometimes and watching movies

so how do you think I should run my system? single 850 PRO 1 TB or RDx2 with the 850 PRO 1TB despite the lower benchmarks that you can see below or keep my current setup?

PS: please don't mention that there is a risk in RAID 0 if one drive the whole array is lost, I don't care about that, I take daily backups and have never had any SSD fail on me in the past 5 years I've been using SSDs so data loss is not a concern

Single 850 PRO 1TB:




Single 840 EVO mSATA 1TB:




2x 850 PRO 1TB:




2x 850 PRO 1TB IOPS:




2x850 PRO 1TB + 840 EVO mSATA 1TB:



2x850 PRO 1TB + 840 EVO mSATA 1TB IOPS:

 

except access time, your own tests show 840 evo as fast as the 850 pro (within margin of error) and therefore if it was my system I would run raid 0 x3, regardless of what "experts" tell me. Most of the stuff you do is mostly longer sequential runs and I doubt access time would even come to play unless your computer run as server or something like that.

 

Right, thanks a lot chief

 

It doesn't matter what set up you have with the stuff your doing... IOPS is literally pointless in your case.. I would be more worried about RAID data failure so RAID your 850s and leave the 840 Evo alone..

 

IMHO there are a few of issues running Raid0 here.

1.) laptop hardware is not 100% hardware run RAID. Your CPU will be tasked significantly combining the stripes etc..

2.) the advantage of a SSD is high IOPS on smaller files (4k etc.) if you use a larger stipe you will be using and reading a lot of dead data on those small files.

3.) in the case of each drive having 4k clusters and you try 8k stripes to eliminate empty data the CPU can increase usage significantly. In my old P78 I setup raid with 8K and actually found with 2 HDD's it limited me to 150 MBs where with a larger stripe I got 230 MBs. Also CPU usage during a high speed transfer was 33% compared to 20% at the larger stripe. Now agreed this is a much older chipset and slower CPU.

 

Do I formatted and installed Windows again in AHCI mode / Single drives......didn't notice one bit of a difference in my workflow since as you say......the most that matters is 4K......with that being said, I'm gonna stick to this setup......