# SSD : Two drives versus One drive?



## newconroer (Jan 8, 2011)

Is there any point to using two separate SSD for the purpose of added performance?
(OS on one, specific data on the other etc.)

Because of how SSDs work, would a 120gb single drive respond the same as 40gb + 80gb drives?


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## FreedomEclipse (Jan 8, 2011)

If you can afford both then it doesnt matter what the purpose is for - but having 90GB SSD for the OS and 120GB+ SSD for games sounds pretty good - its all about preventing the loss of data really. If you main SSD goes down and it has all your important files and other stuff on it - you wont be able to get it back, same with any other drive,

so its always better to have 1 drive running the OS and another to store all your data on


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## digibucc (Jan 8, 2011)

keep in mind also that ssds only give performance increase in heavy hhd use. mostly seek/write.

adobe suite, some games, video transcoding, etc.  anything that uses the hdd a lot. your os, of course.

but as for storage, it's a waste.  go with a 5400 green tb drive for storage.


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## entropy13 (Jan 8, 2011)

Don't forget smaller capacities usually (always?) have slightly different performance compared to the higher capacities even among the same brand's/company's "product range."


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## newconroer (Jan 8, 2011)

entropy13 said:


> Don't forget smaller capacities usually (always?) have slightly different performance compared to the higher capacities even among the same brand's/company's "product range."



That's one thing that did cross my mind, but assuming that performance difference is negligible or 'marginal' I'm just failing to see why I should spend more on two drives than one drive.

With mechanical drives, fetching, paging and etc made a big difference based on how many drives were involved and where that data was physically located(separate drives, outer/inner tracks etc.)

With SSD this all seems to be a moot point.

If I am not worried about a crashing drive, can anyone convince me that two smaller drives is advantageous over one larger?


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## 1freedude (Jan 8, 2011)

Or, instead of getting (as a second) ssd, get a usb 3 drive, either external enclosure type or straight-up thumb drive.  Even if you don't have usb 3 capabilities now, I hope you will get some later...I am going to, soon I hope.

So this is why I think two ssd's of any type is beneficial:  encoding or extracting from one to the other is blazing fast.  I, and many others, call this a scratch disc.  If you do some decent admin, this works really well.


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## newconroer (Jan 8, 2011)

Good idea 1Free, though I don't see that being on the cards for me, at least as a necessity just yet.

I may go with a single SSD and a couple of mechanical data drives for the time being. 120gb of SSD action should be suitable for OS+active games and relevant data.


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## VulkanBros (Jan 8, 2011)

Wonder if 2, say 60 GB SSD drives, in RAID 0 would gain any performance advantages over one 120 GB SSD drive?

With mechanical drives the diff. (one vs. 2 i RAID 0) can be big....especially those with 32 or 64 mb cache......but I dont know about SSD´s


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## FreedomEclipse (Jan 8, 2011)

VulkanBros said:


> Wonder if 2, say 60 GB SSD drives, in RAID 0 would gain any performance advantages over one 120 GB SSD drive?
> 
> With mechanical drives the diff. (one vs. 2 i RAID 0) can be big....especially those with 32 or 64 mb cache......but I dont know about SSD´s



well in Raid, TRIM is disabled. - the general all round performance of a 120GB SSD will always be a little better then the smaller drives. I think you would gain a little bit of performance in random/burst read speeds but windows will still take the same amount of time to boot up. it just depends if you think its worth running without TRIM


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## digibucc (Jan 8, 2011)

you also have to take into account what you are doing with that speed

unless you are often copying files from one system to the other, both with 
RAID ssds, the speed goes to waste.
it will not scale as you expect it to.  first off, the hardware will not scale 1:1 - 
so you will not be doubling performance right from the start , but probably around 170% or so.

then you have to think of sofware - again, what are you doing that will actually make use of that 
speed.  making windows boot in 26s instead of 28s imo is not worth it.
there are a lot of things that really make use of a hard drive, but i don't see a need for RAID 
ssds in home desktops imo, at this point at least. 

and I LOVE ssds.  i have many, and some in the same pc - but raid is a waste with them.


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## ericpepin (Jan 10, 2011)

Ya I think two separate drives is good because if you have all things in just one drive including OS it will create problem if your OS crashed. So try to be your OS in different drive as if you have any problem with the OS you can install a new one without loosing your other data. Thanks


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