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I want to move data to an external hard drive AS FAST AS POSSIBLE and I was wondering whether it would be better to have 2 HDD (7200 rpm or higher 500GB each) in an enclosure running RAID 0 or a single external 1TB SSD. Would the SSD still have a higher read/write speed? The SSD would be samsung evo 840. Part 2 of the question would 2 512 SSD in RAID 0 be the answer?

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    If you need speed, why would you use an external drive? Also, what kind of speed do you need? Linear read/write? Or perhaps random access?
    – Daniel B
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:05
  • I would need to take data with me and/or ship it
    – ShaadShaad
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:10
  • What interface is being used to the external enclosure? That might be the limiting factor.
    – Andrew Morton
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:23
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    You didnt mention the connection type. USB 1/2/3, firewire, esata, something else. Obviously, you cant transfer faster than the connection to the drives
    – Keltari
    Oct 15, 2014 at 15:42
  • Ah you are correct usb3.0
    – ShaadShaad
    Oct 15, 2014 at 16:11

2 Answers 2

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Generally an SSD will be faster than a hard drive (or even a couple in Raid), but it varies depending on the hardware used. SSD's are often assumed to be fast, but that's not always the case.

You will need to check, and compare exact hard drive, and ssd models. Look at their abilities, read speeds/writes speeds/IOPS. Such information should be available from the manufacterer, and in some cases right on the packaging.

The EVO SSD you've listed is quite fast, and has decent IOPS so it will likely out perform any 2 hard drives you choose.

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It depends.

With Raid0, you have a maximum write rate of twice the write rate from a single HDD (as a theoretical upper limit, which is not reached in practice due to some overhead etc). You can compare that with the write rate of a single SSD. It also may depend on the type of data you are going to copy, i.e. a lot of small files, few huge files etc. If you already have the hardware available, just do some write performance tests to see which one is faster.

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