New Comp: 120 or 240 GB OS SSD Created 10 years ago2014-11-18 21:16:15 UTC by TawnosPrime

I'm hoping to soon build a new rig, so I can finally upgrade from my current set-up:

-Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.0GHz
-nForce 750i SLi FTW
-4GB DDR2 800 2x2GB
-640GB 7200RPM
-GeForce GTX 285 1GB

I'm looking at a 'budget' (ha ha) build consisting of:

-Core i5-4690K @ 3.5GHz
-Z97i AC mITX
-8GB DDR3-1600 1x8GB
-OS SSD
-2 x 2TB 7200RPM in RAID 0
-GeForce GTX 970 4GB

This system will be used to only play games. My plan is to install Windows 7 (probably Windows 10) and the various game launchers (Steam, Origin, Battle.NET, odd etc.) on the SSD, and install the games on the RAID drives. I've not decided how I'll handle tools, like GIMP or Blender (or similar), should I start modding again. They'll either be on the OS drive or on a secondary Linux system, which would be my daily driver.

My only uncertainty now is the size of the SSD, and I wanted to get your opinions on it. Should I go with a 120/128GB or a 240/256GB SSD?

-2 x 2TB 7200RPM in RAID 0
Don't, unless you really don't care about the data.

Id drop the second hdd and get more ssd storage. 120gb ssd is the lowest i would recommend.

I second Rufee
My setup right now is a 250GB SSD for Win 7 and games/apps
2x3TB RAID 1 for storage. (Redundant)
If you want to do special raid setups in windows, get Win 7 Professional or else you won't have the tools. I learned the hard way that you can't raid 1 in Base Win 7.
I bought professional just so I could Raid 1. (Then i transferred the other licence to my mom's laptop)

Run intel raid, closer to hardware level.

GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Urby approved!

The RAID setup is for speed more than anything. Trying not to bottleneck the load times any more than necessary. I've got three tiers of builds over on PC Part Picker. The first two, the sensible builds, feature RAID 0 storage drives for speed, and back-ups would be on a NAS device. The third, the balls to the wall build, based on a video I saw that was a 'proof of concept'/'wtf is the industry coming to', uses RAID 10.

As for data security, I'm confident that the risk increase over a single drive is worth the performance jump.

I wouldn't recommend RAID. Just run JBOD like a normal person, you'll be much happier in the long run (when it's time to replace/upgrade a HDD). Save RAID for when you're building servers or something, don't waste your time and happiness dealing with that nonsense for a simple gaming setup. Obviously you don't need backup or redundancy if you're just gaming. If you really want to save that extra 10 seconds launching a game, get the larger SSD and put the games that you play a lot on that.

Also, it seems a bit of a waste to get a powerful GPU like that and then skimping on the CPU. The price increase to get the i7 isn't all that much.

From what I've seen, for the $110 increase, I get 0.5GHz and HT, which games still don't take advantage of.

The problem with a single large SSD for the popular titles, is that with game installs getting bigger and bigger (BF4 for example, uses close to 50GB (guess with Final Stand out today)), it'll become increasingly necessary to move the installs around. There's also the cost factor, as large quality SSDs are pricey.

Yeah, and really, the speed increase for game loading times isn't going to be a lot anyway. Remember that most games are designed for consoles, which still use optical drives and low-power 5400rpm HDDs. The increased speed of SSD/RAID is nice and all, but nowhere near the increase in cost/frustration/effort/failure rate that both of them have.

Jealous!

I would recommend against RAID setup too. THOUGH when you get your setup/apps/settings how you like them, I would HIGHLY recommend imgaging your HDD, so If you have a failure, re-setuping is painless

It's funny you're all telling me not to go RAID. They're very common in gaming PCs from the major manufacturers.

There's just no real reason/need when you could just have an extra HDD.

RAID still fail too, so continue to do hard backups of your work. I image my whole drive mothly, and archive as many images as I have room for.

You'd be better off imo just having 2 HDD an make your image backups there. You could also maintain uncompressed copies(for convenience) to important things like your steamapps directory and digital work on the second HDD.

I would personally like to switch to a cloud backup eventually, but I'm sure that has it's problems/hassles too.

Companies who sell pre-packaged gaming PCs use RAID as a buzzword to get more sales, because the average gamer would know that "it's better", but they don't tend to think of the downsides. The vendors don't have to worry about what happens when you want to upgrade later, and they don't care about the inconvenience caused by a HDD in a RAID setup failing (which will probably be out of warranty).

In the end it's your call, but I would never consider a striped RAID setup, especially in a normal desktop PC. Use mirrored or a hybrid like RAID 5 in your file server (not your desktop) if you want data redundancy, but that's expensive and usually unnecessary. I would only consider RAID for fault-tolerance (not performance) in a server environment, and for me it has absolutely no place in a desktop PC.

Agreed. I use RAID in an external backup drive unit purely for redundancy.

Really JBOD ? Youre just asking for it.

Just go with an ssd and a singe hdd, you won't feel the difference and it might save you from the headaches if your RAID 0 or JBOD dies.

Not sure what your JBOD is rufee, but I meant "Just a Bunch of Disks", which means literally just that - as in, do nothing special with the hard drives whatsoever, you just have a bunch of disks.

What i mean by JBOD is 2 or more physical drives that are logically one drive (spanned), this gives 0 failover just like in RAID 0, but with no benefits whatsoever unlike RAID 0.

If you mean just having 2 physical drives connected and not spanned, then its not JBOD.

Wikipedia actually says that we're both correct

JBOD (abbreviated from "just a bunch of disks") is an architecture using multiple hard drives, but not in a RAID configuration, thus providing neither redundancy nor performance improvements. Hard drives may be handled independently as separate logical volumes, or they may be combined into a single logical volume using a volume manager like LVM; such volumes are usually called "spanned".

I meant the "separate logical volumes" one, because the other one just sounds insane

Never thought that i means both

Thing about RAID is... You think you're doing it right until you get a failure. Then you learn the hard way when something breaks.

I had RAID's break at work for me. Hardware controllers tend to drop drives that don't have something major bad out of the array for some odd reason or maybe to prevent write-holes. Usually its no big deal, put a new drive in set rebuild on and thats it.
If god forbid the controller breaks then you are in shit.

Tet is right you can save a lot of headaches by just going the traditional route and do frequent backups. RAID is not perfect by a long stretch and i don't really recommend running it in a home environment. If you really want to then RAID 1, but nothing beyond that.

OK, so based on your recommendations, I'll switch the 2 x 2TB drives and save a bit of money (and potential hassle w/ installations/moving games) by going w/ a 1TB drive for Origin (FYI, BF4 w/ all five DLC is 58GB, 20 more than BF3), Battle.NET and possibly UPlay games, and a 3TB for Steam games.

However, back on topic :P, given that it'll house just Windows, launchers and modding tools, and no games, should the SSD be 120 or 240?