Two hard drives or one

[Alcibiades]

Im looking at getting a new rig, and with the custom builders I can get a single 160gb intel SSD for 4$ less than I can get two 80GB intel SSD drives.  Just wondering what is the best deal?  I know generally smaller ones are better as larger drives fail more often, but in your guys' opinion which option is better?

Thanks

[Josquius]

Two.
If one does fail the other is still there with all your precious data.
And whats 4$? A beer?

But 160? Thats damn small by todays standards...

[Darth Wagtaros]

Two.
If one does fail the other is still there with all your precious data.
And whats 4$? A beer?

But 160? Thats damn small by todays standards...

Solid state probably.

Go for two.  Mirror them.

[derspiess]

Wouldn't they run super-duper fast in RAID0, though?  I'd be tempted to do that (and then of course run nightly backups )

[Darth Wagtaros]

I bet they'd be pretty radical. 

[MadImmortalMan]

SSD  = Teh Awesome



Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Most people have seen it already, I'm sure, but hey.

[derspiess]

Btw where are those damn hybrid drives we were promised??  They were supposed to be all over the place (and cheap) by now 

[Josquius]

Two.
If one does fail the other is still there with all your precious data.
And whats 4$? A beer?

But 160? Thats damn small by todays standards...

Solid state probably.

Go for two.  Mirror them.

People actually do that?
Seems like a waste of storage space to me, hard drives fail very very rarely and little of my stuff is that critical.

[Vricklund]

Two.
If one does fail the other is still there with all your precious data.
And whats 4$? A beer?

But 160? Thats damn small by todays standards...

Solid state probably.

Go for two.  Mirror them.

People actually do that?
Seems like a waste of storage space to me, hard drives fail very very rarely and little of my stuff is that critical.

Depends on how much storage space you need. I could easily get by with 80GB. You can streaming porn these days you know.

[derspiess]

People actually do that?
Seems like a waste of storage space to me, hard drives fail very very rarely and little of my stuff is that critical.

Definitely a waste of premium storage space IMO.  Assuming you don't need a real-time mirror, doing regular backups (that reside on cheaper standard HDD space) would do just fine.

To get back to your original question, how are the individual 80GB drives rated for read/write speed vs. the 160GB drive?  If they are the same, I would seriously go for doing the two 80GB drives in RAID0.  If the 160GB SSD happens to be about twice the speed as the individual 80GB drives (I saw this when I was briefly pricing SSD's), then I would just go with the 160GB drive.

If you don't want to do any RAID0 to begin with, then I would just go with the 160GB drive for simplicity's sake.

[Alcibiades]

Yeah they would certainly be Raid 0, and yes they are solid states as I said in my opening post.

Thanks guys. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

Two.
If one does fail the other is still there with all your precious data.
And whats 4$? A beer?

But 160? Thats damn small by todays standards...

Solid state probably.

Go for two.  Mirror them.

People actually do that?
Seems like a waste of storage space to me, hard drives fail very very rarely and little of my stuff is that critical.

Some people do, if they want extra redundancy.  Yeah, you could do regular backups and not bother, it is all about the risk of data loss you are willing to take. 

I'd go for RAID 0 if you don't need to worry about losing anything important or have backups.

[grumbler]

160GB in RAID 0 vice 160 in one drive is just double the (small) failure rate with an inconsequential improvement in speed.  One drive for sure.

[Darth Wagtaros]

160GB in RAID 0 vice 160 in one drive is just double the (small) failure rate with an inconsequential improvement in speed.  One drive for sure.

That's not as l33t as having the RAID. 

[MadImmortalMan]

160GB in RAID 0 vice 160 in one drive is just double the (small) failure rate with an inconsequential improvement in speed.  One drive for sure.

It's a solid state drive. It has nowhere near the failure rate you expect from hard drives traditionally--which are basically guaranteed to fail eventually. It's like going from a 5% likelihood to fail to a 0.0001% likelihood. You're gonna complain when you bump it all the way up to 0.0002%?