Crucial M4 64gb raid or no raid?

[Stealth3si]

I am not adamant about running raid but it would be a bonus if I could, then I would.

Please try to answer in descending order if possible at your convenience. Thank you.

1.) I'm a raid virgin and was wondering what are the pros and cons of raiding a pair of these with Asus M5A88-V EVO and AMD 960T?

2.) I have heard there would be no TRIM support so there would be performance degradation. Over time how would I know through benchmark tests if performance have significantly degraded?

3.) The SSDs would also be eventually need to be erased to regain performance but can I create weekly image backups from the raid setup onto an HDD and restore it when it gets slow?

4.) My current M4 64GB SSD has win 7 64-bit OS on it right now and I make weekly image backups. Can I add another M4 64GB to create a raid without having to re-install windows or buy a hardware raid card?

5.) Is it worth it and if so what raid configuration should I do?

6.) Anything else I should know?

[jman98]

1) Why do you want to use RAID on drives this small? And what kind of RAID do you want? Do understand that while this is not likely, it is also not impossible - in a worst case scenario with 2 drives in RAID configuration, a problem with one drive will end up being replicated to the other drive, toasting them both. I've seen this happen. If you are using RAID 0 on two drives, understand that the loss of one drive will make the other one useless.
2) Anything that accesses the drive will be slower.
3) I'm not sure that erasing SSDs will ever get them back exactly to the way they were in the beginning but I have no personal experience here to prove/disprove this.
4) Windows 7 64 bit supports software RAID.
5) In my opinion it's not worth it but I don't know what your goal is. Mirror stuff you can't lose? Try to get 128 GB of SSD space without having to buy a new 128 GB drive by using 2 x 64GB drives?

[Stealth3si]

Any good deals for Crucial M4 128GB $1/GB? A a bit over is fine.

[MJA]

There was was a deal today ,but sold out

http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/288254

[Stealth3si]

would the 128 gb noticeably increase the random write speed so that it would take considerably shorter amount of time to save a 4 MB paint file to disk? I know the seq write is almost twice and that is for large file writes to the disk. But would this also improve my file-saving time? This it the primary reason I'd upgrade to 128gb.

[olyteddy]

...so that it would take considerably shorter amount of time to save a 4 MB paint file to disk

Even a mechanical hard drive, let alone the worlds slowest SSD would not take a significant amount of time to store a 4 MB file.

[Stealth3si]

what else would a 128gb benefit me over the 64gb i have now?

like other than more drive space and fast xfer speeds for large files onto it...what are the top primary 3 reasons to get it for real world practicality? i'm itching to get one because i'm open to the posibility that it will benefit me over the 64gb i have now but may be i don't really need it. how would upgrading benefit me over the 64gb other than what was previously said?

[glockjs]

i would lean towards yes. you'll see an increase in performance with ssd raid. if you only have sata2 then i would say definite yes. the biggest con is you will lose trim.

the only other side of the coin is you are investing in older tech most likely. the newer drives do have some nice features such as GC built into the drive. and the ocz3's are pretty damn fast.

so overall i guess it depends on your budget.

ssd+raid linkie:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-iops,2848.html