Newegg is running a promotion on the Intel 330 120GB SSD. It’s $90 after rebate… and the rebate has a limit of two per customer.
One of the reasons that smartphones have rocketed up and laptops have been on the decline, is the advantage of solid state. It’s what makes the Retina MacBook Pro so powerful, versus today’s standard MacBook Pro, and what gives the MacBook Air that cheaper-but-speedier edge.
Odds are, if you’re reading PhoneNews.com, you’re already well aware of the performance benefit of SSDs. Today, you can actually lock in a good, matched pair of them for a powerful SSD RAID array.
You will also need to use Newegg Promo Code EMCYTZT1783 to lock in the final price, and don’t forget to mail in the $30 per drive rebate.
This deal, like most good deals on this site, is for today online. So act quick.
Intel 330 Series Maple Crest SSDSC2CT120A3K5 2.5″ MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
What is the price of the RAID controller? It seems like in this setup, you’re only including the cost of the SSDs themselves; and there isn’t any discussion of the RAID controller.
Most desktops and home computers do not come with a built-in RAID controller. In that case, you would have to use software RAID. Software RAID is substantially slower than hardware RAID, enough so on some systems to abate a noticeable portion of the performance benefit of SSD. It’s also strewn with OS-specific caveats.
Also, Software RAID controllers on many operating systems are not aware of TRIM. TRIM is what makes the data distributed across the NAND Flash SSD, so that one block does not get over written constantly. If you have a hardware raid controller that is not TRIM-aware, or, a software RAID setup that is not TRIM-capable; you will drive your SSD into the ground within a year or two of normal use. Your corruption will be duplicated to both drives. Excellent!
Many machines have RAID controllers, or support software RAID already. Apple’s OS X for example supports RAID-0 via software, and the performance benefit is significant enough to benefit users without a hardware RAID controller.
You may disagree, but we’ve been doing it for years, and our experience makes it a sound recommendation in our opinion.
Software RAID also passes through TRIM commands, though the Sandforce controller in the Intel 330 does a good job of garbage collection, even when TRIM commands are not passed.
The assertion that not using TRIM will “drive your SSD into the ground” is not correct. Vendors like OWC actually encourage users to disable TRIM on platforms like Mac, and have not encountered the widespread failures you are stating.
Most consumers machines do not have hardware RAID controllers. It’s about $200-$500 extra for a standard RAID controller. Only high-end laptops such as the ThinkPad W series contain these, and most desktops omit it. For example, Dell charges $200-$500 for a PERC Controller.
OCZ is an exception on the TRIM support since their internal controllers handle the garbage collection with the understanding that . Intel does this as well a tthe controller level, but in my experience, it is not a best practice to leave TRIM off if you have TRIM support when using Intel SSDs.
I’ve sent back about a half a dozen intel SSDs between 2010-2012 that were used with XP or Mac systems without TRIM that needed to be returned under warranty since they crashed and were inaccessible and unmountable in other systems (we had backups..). I’ve also seen performance degrade orders of magnitude — from 35,000 iOPS to around 7,500 iOPS; as a result of usage of an intel 320 series SSD with a database like MS-SQL, constantly updated, with no TRIM support.
One great thing about software RAID 0 — loose one SSD, you loose the whole array, unrecoverably so.
I’m sure you have had anecdotal experience where you haven’t had issues. But, among myself and colleagues who work in Enterprise IT, this is certainly seen as being a hack of sorts and not a ‘best practice.’
It would strengthen your article greatly to give your readers more information on RAID support with SSDs, as you’ve done in reply to my comments, and include some of the caveats there. At the very least, it would be a best practice to point out that users should be backing up their data if going with such a setup.
I suggest you study up on the Sandforce controller, and its GC practices. I think you’ll find the OCZ drives you appreciate, and the current generation of Intel SSDs have the same controller. Intel switched to Sandforce controllers with built-in GC in the 330 and 520 series. And yes, that played a factor in our recommendation.
Software RAID-0 has the same failure risk as hardware RAID-0. There is no difference there, when one drive fails, you lose the RAID. This is why we always suggest backups.
In terms of backup necessity, you have the same single point of failure. If you’re tech-savvy enough to read a manual and set up a RAID, and want a RAID for speed, you should know to backup.
We typically push our drives in our office to much greater extremes than the corporate IT world. We routinely take apart our Macs and PCs to upgrade hardware that is current-gen. These SSDs are going into a Mac mini 2.5 GHz Core i5 in our office, for example. Why? Our build system made it hurt, and both HDD and RAM were choke points.
This is a deal post. We typically would post none of this background information, but unfortunately, Google Panda (we have evidence to believe) has penalized us for making posts too short.
We are providing additional information as a benefit on deal postings, but it is not our intention in a deal post to provide a Wikipedia article’s worth of resources. That is, after all, where comments can be used to expand on such knowledge.
Deals usually expire after one day, hence the lack of benefit to readers versus the effort needed to write such primers on a daily/hourly basis for each item.