Memory Would it be a bad idea to raid0 2 evo's?

I was thinking about putting two 250GB Samsung EVO SSD's into a Raid0 array. Sound good?

 

or or or ?

 

Personally I would take advantage of that m.2 slot with Samsung XP941 as it essentially has a similar performance on it's own.
But on new 9 series board it should be no problem as I don't know why the orom would be out of date and not support trim on raid0. Raid0 is always the most risky type, so as long as you are diligent with back up of any data you can't loose... otherwise there is no major downside.
Whether there will be any legitimate real world performance differences in most scenarios is another story.

 

The 2 downsides are that -

(a) you lose the rapid memory cache thing - albeit that it doesn't work anyway if you set the intel controller to raid mode.

(b) if there's any further f/w updates you'll need another machine (or an alt Windows installation on another drive) to run the Samsung Magician s/w; & if that machine uses the same controller & it's set to raid then you'll need to do the process on each in turn.


Whilst the garbage collection really isn't great on the Samsungs - so you can drive them into the ground with a reasonably high write-erase load in non-trim environments - all of the modern intel irst drivers with a relatively up-to-date orom (which your Z97 board will have anyway) will allow trim in R0 so that's not an issue.

For people other than the OP, this doesn't apply to pre-ivy bridge boards (though sandy bridge ones will work with a modded bios)... ...&, whilst the latest irste drivers do support trim in R0/1/10, i'm yet to see any clarification as to how far back the compatibility goes with the X boards.

 

I was really hoping your answers would conform to the aforementioned emoticons or some form of heiroglyph but I suppose there are definitely advantages/disadvantages. I mostly just wanted the large single volume boot drive (I suppose I could have gotten a single 500 GB 840 evo for about the same price).

On the other hand, I've already found that FW updates are a PITA with this setup since Samsung Magician (expectantly) cannot recognize the Raid volume.. but then again I'm not exactly the type to do those in the first place. My C300 is still rocking the original FW from ~3-4 years ago.

Hmm.. I just got everything setup for my dev environment but I suppose I could re-think things. I really need to get a/a-better backup solution. Current solution: add really important things to git and then buy new hard drives and leave all the old data on the old drives (just in case).

 

Oops - just realized the store where I bought these Evo's had the 500GB drive for $30 cheaper than the 2, 250GB's. Maybe I should swap them out for the single model and get the single volume I want with the benefits of not being Raid0. Thoughts?