I am thinking of upgrading from a Western Digital 10k RPM hard drive to using two Intel-X25 solid state drives in RAID 0 configuration. I will be using this for hosting the operating system and installing applications. But all data is currently and will remain stored on a separate Seagate Barracuda 7.5k RPM hard drive.
My goal is to significantly improve performance of the OS (Vista Ultimate) and startup of applications. I have two concerns…
1, Are Intel-X25 drives reliable enough to use in a hard working machine especially when you have two of them in RAID 0 and so double the chance of failure.
2, I hear that solid state drives have a limited number of write cycles before they stop working and so is heavy desktop usage going to cause them to expire within a couple of years? My expected upgrade cycle means I would probably replace my machine after 2 years anyway.
Best Answer
All drives fail. Either through wear, or though manufacturing fault. By placing those drives in a RAID0 configuration you have doubled the chances of a drive fault destroying your data.