Why two SSD's ??

Hi guys,


I'm a bit confused, and please ask for clarifications,


Ok, before SSD's where really expensive and didn't have a big capacity for an affordable price. So the "movement" begins with people buying SSD's for BOOT system and another HDD for storage. So they will be able to have a faster boot time and stock all the rest in the HDD, this was an ideal system.

Today SSD's became really avordable and the capacity of them became also very considerable,

So here is my question, why do I still see a lot of people buying two SSD's ??? Again, one for the boot (smaller one) and a bigger one for the storage. What is the purpose of it ?? Do I missing something ??

At least if you are putting two SSD's and set it as RAID 0 I can understand but as separately storage I do really not… Could somebody please clarify me on this ?

Does that have any impact on the OS if you are using only one SSD (boot time, write, read…) ?? For example if I want to use only 1TO SSD M.2 for my laptop (workstation, Alienware 17). All my finished work is stocked in an external SSD, so I do actually not need more than 1TO…

If I install Windows 10 + all **** (3d MAX, Photoshop, illu,…) What will be then the impact for me ?

 

Big capacity high performance SSDs are still expensive, so buying a cheap but big SSD is still faster than a hard disk for data. It makes some sense to buy a fast SSD that is just big enough for your OS if you are looking for the best performance and then a slower SSD for bulk data.

If it's two identical SSDs, it would be better to put them into a RAID0 array for performance, but it also doubles the risk of failure.

 

really the performance is not discernible to the end user in a ssd raid 0 setup...you're much better off using the ssd's separately or setting up raid 1 redundancy if you have sensitive information.

 

Thanks ALLurGroceries and Raidriar !! Really appreciated !

Ok I get it, it is true that high performance SSD's are still expensive and I can understand the choice for the second SSD then…

But for my case, I'm thinking to purchase on a 960 pro 1TO, like I said I do not really need more space... This will not impact in any way my system ? (boot time, write, read, messing up with OS folders,…)

For the RAID's options, I'm with you guys !! But as I'm searching to use only one drive this is not an option for me

Edit : O yea BTW, I think that somehow the RAM is related to my question (I think it is something related with the SSD using the RAM capacity when to full…) not sure, but in the case of asking, I have 32Gb of RAM…

 

Welp, you may be asking about a pagefile which if you had a single disk and it was a SSD, would be used for paging data that couldn't (or for some reason shouldn't) be stored in RAM. That can negatively affect your SSD performance and life, but if you have enough RAM for the applications you're running it's not a major consideration.

A one drive setup is fine, there's really no reason not to go that way if you don't need redundancy.

 

A lot people just don't get how ssds impact performance. For example a 1TB 950 Pro is... geez 600+ dollars... That's a terrible value. The 950 Pro is a pcie ssd so while it's theoretical speeds are way way higher than a SATAs that's not what happens in reality. For boot times, game load times, and most general usage you'd never be able to tell the difference. File transfers, decompression, and video editing are the tasks that actually benefit a lot. If that's what you do all the time go for it, but all I see is the fact that I could buy nearly 3 1TB sandisk Ultra II or X400 ssds and have an almost identical experience with way way more storage.

 

Another thing is they simply do not make larger drives for those of use that are used to 8TB+ drives in desktops. So we are left with buying up a bunch of smaller drives. I recently got my first 4TB SSD and it was expensive, so I am living with a smaller 1TB that I spanned into a single larger 5TB disk.

Basically, as said in above posts, it costs more than we want to spend combined with the lack of really large drives that forces us to have many smaller drives.

Another reason you may see multiple SSD’s is people buy one, and buy a 2nd later, or replace a HD later so they end up with 2 smaller ones installed.

 

pretty much any name brand ssd today will give you a great user experience. they may not show up to be the highest performing in benchmarks, but I tend to aim for reliability and features rather than outright performance.

For this, i use crucial/micron SSDs. Reliable, feature rich, affordable.

Outright performance goes to sandisk extreme pro or samsung 850 pro

 

Agreed. I've even bought a few of the cheaper ones like the low end ADATA off amazon. They work great and compared to hard drives they are so much better.

Are they the fastest? No, but they are about the cheapest!

 

As modern AAA games get larger and larger (Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is around 70 GB!), there's a greater benefit to installing them on a solid-state drive to improve load times. Titles from, say 2011, and earlier are still perfectly fine running from a platter drive, but with newer stuff, you will notice a marked improvement. Of course, the irony is that SSDs offer far less capacity for the money. At the same time, enthusiast-grade notebooks often have at least one, if not two PCI-Express/mSATA slots where you can put a couple SSDs while also having 1-2 bays for standard 2.5-inch units, so you can augment your storage with additional SSDs and/or platter drives. That's what I'm rolling right now - 2 1 TB mSATA drives, and I plan to add a 1-2 TB spinner in the near future for the games that don't really need the ultra-fast access times. Best of all worlds, I'd say.

 

Those are both SATAs... What's the point you can't tell a difference from like an MX300. Outright performance pcie ssds are better.

 

If you can afford a single ssd for all your data that's the best way to go .. won't notice much difference between 1 ssd and 2 ssds. And transfer rates on even basic Samsung evo line is fast enough for most people.

 

Stock PCIe SSD PM951 from Dell is for Windows and a SATA ssd 850 evo for linux. That's my setup.

 

I had lot of gaming computers, desktops assembled by myself and at least 4 Alienware. For the first time, i have a fancy SSD in it because i didnt want to buy one before that and you know what ? I couldnt care less.

I really dont know why ppl buy SSD. Okay, it boot faster, then what ? It saves 20sec on a boot, what a miracle. My old 490$ Lenovo Z500 with a 1To HDD 5400 takes 40 sec to boot. My new 2800$ Alienware 17 takes 18sec. What a revolution ahah.

 

Faster boot, faster app loads, much more responsive windows start menu, paging file is on the much faster SSD. My older Inspiron 17 is much faster than my fiancé's newer hp laptop that had a newer generation i7 processor because I have an SSD and she doesn't.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

 

I disagree there. A SATA ssd is way faster than a hard drive. You also need to wait for apps to load on an hdd before using apps after logging in.

Game load times are also way way faster and the UI in general snappier.

 

2 things

1: if you were only getting 18 seconds to boot on ssd, something was wrong; maybe a ton of bloatware. You should get 10 seconds easily. I get a boot time of 7 seconds

2: all that time adds up... say 30 seconds of boot time saved per boot, boot once a day for every day of the year... that's 3 hours saved in a year of just waiting for your PC to boot.

best yet the SSD also makes faster application launch times, faster loading screens in games, and marginally improved FPS. So saving even more time and just better performance.

Also, SSDs less likely to fail, no moving parts (but they still can fail). They survive drops and mishaps better too.

 

For me, it takes 6-7 seconds to boot up even with 4 apps in startup.

 

I moved from a Samsung 850 pro to a Samsung 950 pro to a Samsung 960 pro

There really is no difference. Save your money and put it into something else.

Just to be specific a Java code compile which uses a good amount of IO took 15 seconds on the Samsung 950 pro and dropped to 14 seconds on the Samsung 960 pro.

You just won't notice the difference