Hi,
Receiving soon a new Alien Area 51m R2, and the sales person talked me into getting 2 Ssd 500g set up in Raid 0 (boot disk, he said) and 1 ssd 500g as storage disk.
This laptop will be used almost exclusively for MSFS.
Question:
Would you install FS on the raid 0 pair of SSDs, or on the single drive?
He said the benefit of raid0 is faster loading times, but I read that raid 0 increases the risk of disk failures.
If I use the single ssd, would I quickly run out of space? And are loading times that bad?
Pls share your recommendations !
Thanks!
Other specs:
i7 10700k
32g ram
RTX 2070Super
Raid 0 doesn’t increase the risk of failure. If you use a single disk as your Windows drive and it fails you’ve lost windows. If a disk in RAID 0 fails, you’ll lose windows. So the issue in both cases is losing a disk causes you to lose Windows. It’s very much an issue of disk reliability (and SSDs are more reliable than traditional hard disks)
Raid 1 (a mirror set) protects you from single disk failure but the downside is lower performance than RAID 0 and you only get the capacity of a single disk whereas in RAID 1 you get the sum of the capacity of the disks.
I run M2 SSDs in RAID 0 as my system disk and definitely get better performance than from a single disk.
I fun MSFS from a separate SSD dedicated to MSFS.
I’d definitely go for RAID 0. Just take backups of anything you care about, like you should be doing anyway. RAID 0 doesn’t make the disks unreliable or anything. It just means that if either of the disks fails, you lose the data on both. So while its still a low chance for a disk failure, its twice as high as if you only had one disk because either one could fail.
Don’t let that scare you though. 0.01%x2 is still only 0.02%
I run FS on a single hard drive and WIN10 on SSD. If a failure on any of the drives occur, I use Acronis backup software. I recently had to restore this PC and it only took 1.4 hours. System is fast as ever.
Extreme data throughput won’t net you a performance increase in msfs 2020, just wanted to throw that point out there. Unless initial loading times are huge for you, but in game you won’t see a thing.
I’ve tried multiple ssd configs and in game no results.
Thank you all for the valuable advice. In light of this, I’ll keep the 2 raid0 drives as system drives and will use the third ssd for FS.
Much appreciated!