PC noob wanting to get into PC gaming

[Ganoncrotch]

Zkuq said:

Ganoncrotch said:

I know you could set up a RAID 1 setup like you said combining say a 240gb SSD with 240gb of a normal HDD it would give you a very strange pairing of disks working together with the standard drive just being a backup of the SSD but at

http://ask.adaptec.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17037/~/q-%26-a%3A-hybrid-ssd%2Fhdd-raid

They go into creating a RAID 10 setup with double those disks with the aim to get double the performance of an SSD mirrored onto a normal HDD space... that said you can't really use raid 0 over a mechanical HDD and an SSD, well... you might be able to, but it really isn't going to work I think as at the end of the day any files stored on the mechanical parts of the drive are still going to be effected by the spin up time and disk head speed to find the files on the drive phsically even if there is an SSD storing some portions of the files.

It's interesting to mess with different raid setups but in reality anything using raid 0 between SSD and HDD is going to be a strange combo.

That said, as for the SSD for OS/Programs and Mechanical HDD for media not making the media seeking work faster as permalite said, that isn't entirely true, While obviously seeking out the start of the Avi file to play on the mechanical HDD will still take the same lenght of time, having the media playing program on the SSD will allow windows to get that open and ready to receive the file far faster with a OS SSD than without. So while in a perfect world SSD's everywhere would be great for a standard user SSD's on the primary drive will do wonders for opening programs to assist a mechanical media drive.

As for an hybrid SSHD for media, again... only so much can phsically fit on the Flash storage point of that type of drive which the drive will determine based on usage of those files, if you have 500gb of movies on an SSHD it isn't going to  put 10mb of the start of each file into that SSD portion of the drive because you will not have used any of the files before wanting to watch them, they just don't have that flexibility or awareness to know you are going to be sending requests to watch individual files at a point, they just work on file usage as the drive works inside the PC.

 

amg... wall of text, for a noob user avoid RAIDs lol, I don't mean to use the term noob here in a bad way towards anyone, I more am substituting what I would normally say as beginner user with the term used byt the OP, don't mean to offend!

I wasn't talking about RAID 0, 1, or 10. The correct term appears to be SSD caching, which as far as I've understood things, is equivalent to what SSHDs are doing. Essentially, a smaller SSD is used as a cache for a larger HDD. And to clarify things further, I wasn't talking about SSD-level performance either, because I'm sure SSD caching and SSHDs don't have quite that performance (although they should get closer to it than regular HDDs).

Anyway, being a RAID noob, this was a good incentive to read up on RAID a bit. It never seems to be useful for home use (at least for me), so every time I read about it, I tend to forget it. :p

If you don't know anything about them RAID 5 is a very good way to make sure you never lose any information and it only comes at the cost of one harddrive , you can have it starting from 3 drives so if you have 3 1tb drives you end up with 2 terabytes of basically perfectly minded storage, if any one of the 3 drives dies you can just replace it and rebuild all your data, but you can expand raid 5 to include more drives and you'll always just be losing 1 drive worth of space.

It doesn't add anything performance wise for the drives though, but even for at home in pc use it comes at a small cost and gives you great data protection.