Raid 0 Vs Ssd

I will be ordering a Sager np9262 in two weeks from Xotic.com and I’m trying to decide on the Hard drive configuration. I wondered which is best a setup pro’s and con’s;

Three 500GB 5400RPM (Serial-ATA II 300 - 8MB Cache) HHD’s in Raid 0 or

Two 500GB 5400RPM (Serial-ATA II 300 - 8MB Cache) HHD’s in Raid 0 with Patriot 64GB SATA II SSD (which I will buy from newegg)

Yes I will be gaming and I would like the heavy storage.

Here’s the set-up I think I want;
17" WUXGA "Glare Type" Super Clear Ultra Bright Glossy Screen (1920x1200)
- ~Intel Core 2 QUAD Q9550 2.83GHz w/ 12MB L2 Cache - 1333MHz FSB
- 1,024MB PCI-Express nVidia GeForce 9800M GTX DDR3 DX10 (User Upgradeable and I will be)
- ~ 4,096MB DDR2 800 (2 SODIMMS) Dual Channel Memory
- ~Combo 8x8x6x4x Dual Layer DVD +/-R/RW 5x DVD-RAM 24x CD-R/RW Drive
- Raid 0-Stripe (Combines primary and secondary hard drive)
- Internal Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR
- Built-in Intel® PRO/Wireless 5300 802.11 a/g/n Wi-Fi Link

Thanks for all your help and off topic. I want this laptop to pull double duty is there a way to set it up to play PS3 games on the screen I’m told that the TV tuner that you can buy with it internally can’t do it. It has a 5 sec lag.

 

Raid 0 will be a bit slower then an SSD although not as big a difference as to pay an extra couple hundred bucks.

SSD's are immature technology. Seems as if controllers (microns etc.) on many of the "budget" MLC models is causing some erratic behavior in them. If I were you I would wait a bit until the Intel SSD's get released

 

If you have the dough, go with the proven SLC tech for main drive and don't bother RAID0 2 other drives for storage...

 

dont bother with raid.
That system has a software based raid controller, so at most you will see 5-7% increase in harddrive performance (with raid 0)
It will be better to use a SSD as the primary drive since it will perform better than any mechanical drive.

K-TRON

 

Oh bull, you have plenty of extra CPU power for software raid. It is twice as fast with large files and not any faster on tiny files.
This is the same type of stuff people said about software modems back in the day! But they still got a better ping and less lag then hardware modems.
I've got a scsi intel srcu42X hardware card in one computer which is not much better then software raid.

 

what are you testing your raid with?
If your using a synthetic benchmark, the results will be the same, but if your using a real life benchmark, the performance will be very different.
Software raid is usually between 5 and 7% efficient, whereas hardware raid is around 80% efficient.
I have 4 hitachi ultrastar's in raid on a Tyan server board, and the hardware raid controller performs 84% efficient when scaling 4 SAS drives in raid 0. A server with a software raid chip would be much less efficient.
Your performance is most likely hindered by your raid card. Intel makes really bad raid controllers. 3ware, tyan, supermicro, areca and promise make much better raid controllers.
Modems and raid are completely different and not comparable.

K-TRON

 

What exactly does "efficient" mean? A bicycle is many times more efficient then a muscle car. Which one would you rather be on the road with?

There are millions of people out there using "crappy intel raid" every day who are quite happy with it. They see significantly faster boot times and level loads in games for example. Are the true hardware controllers faster? Well yes duh. For what they cost they **** well better be and frankly in a home environment you probably aren't going to see a huge difference. We aren't talking about massive database servers here, we are talking about a laptop.

 

I know we are talking about laptops. I have hardware raid in my laptop, and the pcmark loading scores are just shy of 19mb/sec.
On D901C or any other system with software raid, with the same drives, the harddrive score will be about 10mb/sec.

Trust me, their is a big difference, and you dont need an enterprise system to see a difference.
All but one laptop has a software raid controller, so no matter which one you pick, it has software raid, unless you buy a d900k, which has a VIA raid controller.

K-TRON