I'm running my Windows 7 installation and all of my apps from an SSD for performance reasons. Since SSD's can instantly die at any moment, I'm looking for some kind of data backup strategy. Right Now I regularly backing up the drive image on a hard disk, but that only happens once per day, which is not enough for my taste.
So I got an idea: What if I created a software raid 1 of the SSD and partition on my Hard disk?
All data would be mirrored on both drives, making this a lot safer. But what about performance? Will Windows 7 detect that the SSD is faster than the hard drive and always read from the SSD? Or will it randomly read from both, thus reducing read performance?
Thanks,
Adrian
Edit: I just found this article which basically answers my question. Feel free to close this post.
Best Answer
I would expect a performance degradation at a minimum.
When the machine is sending I/O write signals to the slower drive and it can't keep up with the SSD, the only option is to wait until the buffer is empty, so you will experience performance of the lowest common denominator. The read operations will likely be distributed evenly across the set.
I don't know of a controller yet that is this versatile and will detect the performance bottlenecks you are trying to avoid.