Is Raid 0 the optimum setting for SSD drives?

Hi,

I am about to replace the 2 drives on my DAW with SSD drives (I now have a laptop with an SSD drive, and I can't wait to have my DAW the same way, it is so much faster..)

My IT specialist friend is going to do the upgrade for me and suggests as follow:

"My advise to you would be to buy two ultra fast SSDs such as the 256GB OCZ Vector & Vertex 4 (think you already have one of the latter) and create a stripped RAID0 array. This will combine the capacity of the two drives and double the speed of them. So think of it as if the SSDs can write at 540MB/s, it would potentially write at 980MB/s as it writes half the data to one drive at the same time as the other half is being written to the second drive.


Once you have this in place you must backup daily, as if one of the drives in the array fails, you will loose everything, so doing a bare metal backup to a second drive or cloning the entire array to another hard drive is what you should be thinking about."



So, I'm ready to go with this setup. I've searched this forum and a few posts were saying Raid 0 is too risky, causes too many failures and problems.

Now, I'm a little worried.

What should I do?

Any advice much appreciated,

In a perfect world this might be true.  However, a lot of it has to do with your RAID controller.

Most consumer grade controllers don't have options for optimizing your RAID config beyond some basic settings.  An often overlooked function of RAID performance is block size.  For large files such as audio a larger block size is better since you can get more data into the block.  The reason is if you can fit all of the file into one block your seek times will be faster because each disk can seek independently and you could potentially see that double your throughput.  However, it's highly unlikely that you can create a block size large enough to contain a single audio file and the disk cost would be much greater because larger block sizes reduce the overall storage potential of a disk since smaller files take the same block space as larger files.  So, your audio file will be broken up into chunks and stored in multiple blocks and the disks will have to read these files one block at a time anyway--just like on a single non-RAID disk.  You might see a very slight performance gain but nothing anywhere near double your throughput.  In my opinion, such a small gain is not worth the potential instability and potential data loss you might suffer if one of the drives fails.
 
EDIT:  I accidentally a word.

+1

Jim Roseberry

"My advise to you would be to buy two ultra fast SSDs such as the 256GB OCZ Vector & Vertex 4 (think you already have one of the latter) and create a stripped RAID0 array

Bad advice...


A good SATA-III SSD should sustain 500+MB/Sec (when attached to an integrated Intel SATA-III controller).
Why in the world would you put a pair of those in RAID-0?
Totally unnecessary... and not much benefit at all... as you'll saturate the SATA-III bus at 600MB/Sec.
Use the 2nd SSD to stream large/complex sample libraries.  That's where SSD really shines.

Just adding a +1 to the advice already given. 
I just finished my DAW build and was also thinking about going RAID. 
After loads of reading it seems the popular consensus (for DAW's anyway) is that the possible (=small) benefits aren't worth the risk. 

Mike

Jim Roseberry

Bad advice...


A good SATA-III SSD should sustain 500+MB/Sec (when attached to an integrated Intel SATA-III controller).
Why in the world would you put a pair of those in RAID-0?
Totally unnecessary... and not much benefit at all... as you'll saturate the SATA-III bus at 600MB/Sec.
Use the 2nd SSD to stream large/complex sample libraries.  That's where SSD really shines.

This would be a more practical application of two SSD's in your system.  


In the interest of full disclosure I have a RAID0 audio disk and a RAID1 backup all with enterprise HDDs running off the RAID controller in the Z77 chipset. In my experience so far I find it to be completely overkill for audio (even at 96k). If I was going to get more serious about having a RAID setup I would buy a dedicated RAID controller card and not use the built in controller on the motherboard (I've learned quite a bit more about RAID configuration and implementation since I set up my current machine). A single SSD will deliver astonishing performance for audio and be as reliable as any RAID0 configuration and will work perfectly with your built in controller.