http://www.robertmead.net/ssd-raid-5/
SSD or RAID? Which is faster?
I'm going to be building a computer shortly and I value fast start-up times, which I understand is generally limited by the hard drive (considering the other components will be fairly high-end). I know that Solid State Drives are the fastest individual drives on the market, but I also know that RAID 0 and RAID 5 (among others) offer great performance as well. I have been looking at the Intel X-25M 80GB SSD for a boot drive with a 640 GB Caviar Black HD for storage, which would cost a total of about $300; however, the motherboard I am looking at (ASUS P6X58D-E) supports RAID 0/1/5/10 with a total of 6 SATA II and 2 SATA III inputs.
My basic question is: for the same cost as I would have to pay to get the SSD and Caviar Black or less, could i build a RAID 5 array that is as fast or faster than the Intel Drive? (The Intel X25M has read speeds of 250MB/s; I was looking at the WD Caviar Blue 320GB drive for the RAID).
Thanks!
The start time is governed by what you have starting when Windows starts and the Hard Drive speed is almost irrelevant.
RAID will take more time to initialise as it always checks the RAID array is healthy before continuing and Windows 7 is optimised for SSD so if you have W7 then I would suggest you go for that option.
The more you load into Windows the slower it starts as it has more things to check before Windows boots completely, a good CPU and plenty of Free and Virtual memory will offset some the lag, but ultimately the fastest way to get Windows to a usable state is stop as much as possible booting up with Windows. You can use msconfig to do this or buy a utility program like Tune up utilities to do it.
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