Slipped a Disk

In November 2011 I had some SSD Failures which made me cry a lot. QQ More, I know. Having to fall back to a Magnetic HDD is a first world problem but its the state of play - and heres why it pissed me off.

Buying value-for money I based my machine off of the Asus M78A-Pro. It included onboard video with HDMI out, so I knew that I could run the PC without a video card as a Media Player when I retire it from being a games/development PC.
It also has a good BIOS, and Six SATA slots. Thats the focus of this article - coming up with 'the best' disk config.

After fiddling in the Spring 2011 my setup looked like this:
The first slot is a 128GB Crucial SSD. This is my boot drive.
The second slot is for my BluRay drive.
The third slot is for a magnetic HDD (WD Green 1.5TB). Its housed in an enclosure to keep it quiet.
The fourth and fifth slot have 180GB SSDs in RAID-0.
The Sixth slot is empty.

Conclusions
Having an SSD as your main drive is great, and booting on SSDs is fast.  The capacity hasn't been a problem yet but I've used about 100GB. From a fresh install, Win7 took about 15 seconds from power on to desktop fully booted. These days its slowed to around twenty seconds, but still pretty fast. The Boot drive is a Crucial 128GB drive. Solid, reliable. Fast.

I don't use my computer for watching BluRays, so in hindsight a good DVD drive would have been fine. And I already had one so could have saved some money.  I think I only used it for the initial OS install, and actually an external/DVD drive might have been a smart choice and saved me an SATA slot for something else.

The magnetic HDD has been great. A huge capacity, its used for big installs to save room on the boot drive, media and some personal projects. Its never really a performance bottleneck as I don't use it for anything that is speed critical.

Lastly, SSD RAID is a great place to install games. SSDs are fast, and the stripe configuration is double the size and double the speed of a normal SSD.  Since all my games are easily installable, and saved games/profiles/user accounts are mostly online I'm happy with a two-drive stripe and adding a third for parity costs £200 more but gains me nothing so the last SATA port remains empty.
The Games drive is a pair of OCZ Vertex-2s.  Fast, cheaper, larger than the Crucial drive, this is where performance really counts.

Until ... BAH! One of the gaming SSDs failed. . . and then two weeks later so did the second. Even that £200 parity wouldn't have saved me.
The moral of the story? Not sure. The theory was pretty sound. I don't *much* care that I lost the SSDs. The machine is still fast, and I didn't lose anything I couldn't reinstall. The magnetic drive has my CD collection - but I've got a backup of all that anyway.

The SSD stripe was the crown jewel in the setup. Its still a fast machine but when you've run with the cheetahs once then everything else feels like you are plodding with the elephants. The come down of both OCZ SSDs dying within two weeks was heartbreaking.
I'm probably not going to buy from OCZ next time, thats all I can say.

We can rebuild it. Faster. Larger. We have the technology.

More news as it breaks.