I am looking to uprade the HD on my computer I am looking at either 2 x 128GB Samsung 830 (about £70 on Amazon) or 2 x Intel 180GB 330 (£90 on dabs) or 1x 256 Samsumg 830 (£130 on amazon) I want around 256GB of storage for my apps and a few game installs. At the moment I only have sata 2 so I have been considering getting a Star Tech SATA controller card from Amazon (amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-Port-SATA-Express-Controller/dp/B003GS8VA4/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) Will using the controller card (and therefore Sata3) make that much difference? The StarTech card can do RAID 0 so is it worth putting 2 drives into RAID? I know TRIM didn't work for RAID in the past but this seems to have changed now, if it doesn't work can I get garbage collection to work easily enough? Finally if the RAID0 option is doable which drives would be the best bet to put in RAID? Thanks for all your help!
I run a ssd raid 0 setup. Unfortantly its only the latest rst drivers that give trim in raid and i think they are limited to the z77 chipset and newer.
That card does not support hardware RAID. It might not even have a BIOS chip, which means you cannot boot off of it. On top of everything, it's PCI-E x1, which is severely bandwidth limited. You can't even reach the full speed of a single SATA 6Gbit/s drive, let alone two. As bdigital said, you get TRIM support together with RAID0 only if you are using the Z77 chipset with its onboard SATA controller. You are much better off with your onboard SATA 3Gbit/s. That will only limit the maximum sequential speeds slightly, which is no issue unless you move around massive files all day. I'd also say RAID0 isn't worth the hassle, as the speeds you get with a single SSD are already pretty insane.
Awesome, perfect reply, thank you very much! Think I will just go for the Intel 180GB 330 for a system drive for now, then save up for the 256GB Samsung for a gaming drive!
