80GB SSD or 2TB RAID10?

[tankman1989]

I just received an Intel 80GB SSD, it was about 30-35% more than Crucial or OCZ HD's, but the Intel had all 5/5 rating and no failures, so to me it was worth it. For the same price, maybe a little more ($20-30) I can buy 4 1TB drives and make a pretty fast RAID10 array.

Which would you choose?

 

[Martyn]

Well with my little knowledge of both I still think there is no comparison. Whilst a striped set is fast you still have hard drives v ssd. you also have redundancy and you wouldn't with the ssd. Ask yourself what you need, extra speed with redundancy or even faster with ssd.

 

[ReclaiMe]

RAID 0 or RAID 10 array will still have the access time of the hard drive. RAIDing rotational drives does not improve rotational latency. Linear read speed improves in RAID, but acess time does not.

 

[JosephLeo]

in a RAID array you're using a LOT more energy to power up, you're going to have to deal with noise and vibration (unless you've got a nice case and some rubber screw mounts) you're still using spinning hard drives and of course, it's still not as fast.

with the SSD you have little space to work with, you're cost per GB is pretty damn high and of course you have the relatively short lifespan of 1,000,000 write cycles (per bit I think)

Those are the cons of both systems and as a heavy file user I can't live with an SSD just yet unless it's for the OS and software I frequently use.

 

[MobileTechie]

If I wanted lots of space and decent transfer rates I'd go for the drives. If I wasn't bothered about capacity but speed was more important then I'd get the SSD.

They have potentially different applications.

 

[Paul Rodgers]

I still don't fully trust SSDs. I think it was Intel that had issues with their SSD firmware not so long ago.

I would go with the RAID 10 setup. Just make sure that you do a hardware RAID instead of a software RAID.

Another option is to run Windows on the 80 GB SSD and run the 2 TB RAID 10 setup for data.

 

[arrow_runner]

I had a pair of 250GB Western Digital Blacks Raid 0 in my gaming/htpc PC. Throughput didn't seem consistent and even at it's best it wasn't as fast as 1 120GB Corsair SSD.(Which has since replaced the 2 blacks) Reduced noise was also a plus.