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I have a relatively old motherboard (msi BIG BANG-XPOWER) that has 8 SATA ports, 6 of which are SATA-2 and 2 of which are SATA-3 and I'm thinking of creating a RAID-0 array of two or four SSD drives. Both controllers of this mobo support RAID-0. I don't want to buy any extra RAID controller since those are relatively expensive. So, my first decision is to buy some SATA-3 drives instead of SATA-2 since those are readily available, relatively cheap etc. First, I can't decide if I should buy two drives and connect them to the SATA-3 ports or four drives and connect them to SATA-2 ports. In the second case, the speed will be limited by the SATA-2 protocol. Is any solution faster than the other or it's the same thing? Also, if I go with the 2nd solution should I check benchmarks and minor differences among the drives? I mean, they will be connected to SATA-2 ports, does it matter if one is a bit faster than the other?

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  • What other options do you have? You can either use a 2-disk RAID or a RAID which has up to 4-disks. One will run at SATA 3 speeds the other at SATA 2 speeds. Sounds like you should make this decision based on your needs.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 6, 2015 at 11:54

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There will be a difference, assuming your SSD's are relatively modern ones, which are capable of fully utilizing the SATA-3 interface.

However, the max theoretical throughput for SATA-3 is 750 MByte/sec (6Gbit/sec) which is insanely fast. For comparison the max theoretical throughput of SATA-2 is 375 MByte/sec (3Gbit/sec) which is still very very fast.

You have to consider, where the data is comming from and at what speed. Most applications will not be able to deliver data to your drives at anywhere near the theoretical max speed of SATA-2. Even a gigabit ethernet connection will not be able to deliver data fast enough for the difference in read/write speed to have an impact.

If your goal is maximum theoretical speed, I would go with the 2x SATA-3 solution, but for almost all real-world applications, there will be a non-noticable difference in IO performance.

If I were making this decicion, I would look more towards price and matching your needs with regards to storage space and redundancy than performance. As any of the two solutions will be fast enough for about 99% of real world use-cases.

If you want to see some numbers from someone who actually did testing of this, I will refer you to this article which has extensive benchmarking on exactly SSD's on SATA-2 vs SATA-3. It also has a bunch of relevant observations/considerations, which may help you decide.

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  • Of course RAID-0 is a horrible choice. If a single drive fails then the entire RAID fails. If your motherboard RAID support doesn't include RAID-1+0 its not worth using.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 6, 2015 at 15:07

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