PCI Express SSDs

[JohnGabriel]

I've been really happy with my 2x 840 Pros. Same write speed in RAID 0 as the PCI-E M.2 and absolutely no slouch at 1GB/sec sequential reads. How were you planning on using them?

I put two in RAID0 to run WoW from and a single for the OS. Wanted to get four to have dual RAID0 but would have had to wait for shipping.

Everything has been zoom zoom zoom so was just assuming the teenager at Best Buy did an ok job picking it out for me. These were replacing some Intel SSDs that went bad.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I put two in RAID0 to run WoW from and a single for the OS. Wanted to get four to have dual RAID0 but would have had to wait for shipping.

Everything has been zoom zoom zoom so was just assuming the teenager at Best Buy did an ok job picking it out for me. These were replacing some Intel SSDs that went bad.

I've been running my OS from the same raid as my games since I took the SSD plunge on 48GB Kingston SSDNow drives. I have yet to have any of them fail. I did limit the original 48 and 64GB models to 85% of capacity to give them spare blocks but I didn't do that with the 256GB 840 Pros. I'd pull the SMART data off of them but I don't think Samsung publishes the wear/life data publicly to determine accurately what the write amplification and such was on them. Also, I'm hearing from my OS guy that Win10 is the first Windows OS to fully support SSD optimizations, so there's that.

[JohnGabriel]

I've been running my OS from the same raid as my games since I took the SSD plunge on 48GB Kingston SSDNow drives. I have yet to have any of them fail. I did limit the original 48 and 64GB models to 85% of capacity to give them spare blocks but I didn't do that with the 256GB 840 Pros. I'd pull the SMART data off of them but I don't think Samsung publishes the wear/life data publicly to determine accurately what the write amplification and such was on them. Also, I'm hearing from my OS guy that Win10 is the first Windows OS to fully support SSD optimizations, so there's that.

Mine didn't wear out from any sort of write-life as far as I know, they were fairly new. They just up and quit working, assuming one of the chips on board fried. One of the bad things of SSDs is I couldn't recover any of the data like on traditional hard drives. Goes bad, and your data is just gone.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Mine didn't wear out from any sort of write-life as far as I know, they were fairly new. They just up and quit working, assuming one of the chips on board fried. One of the bad things of SSDs is I couldn't recover any of the data like on traditional hard drives. Goes bad, and your data is just gone.

Fair point. To paraphrase the gaming strategy: backup early, backup often. The only time I've lost anything in the last 20 years is when I was putting off backups or hadn't replaced a backup device. I have yet to have any SSD fail outright; the 48GB ones degraded in speed but they still didn't fail. I work with SSDs daily and the only failures I've ever seen of those is a cheap brand with large block sizes that were used in a linux environment with shit-tons of small writes, resulting in ~22x write amplification, resulting in gigabytes of writes per day.

Point is, as long as you're being sane about backups, there's no reason to segregate games drives and OS drives and I doubt the original concerns have been factors since about the second gen for any of the reputable manufacturers.