SSD RAID

[Lissa]

I could necro any number of old threads to ask my questions, but I thought a new topic might be more polite.

For the past year or two I have happily been using an Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 for WoW. Then came 4.1 this week and that was the end of that. When Cataclysm hit there was a workaround of patching on a different disc, then copying back to the SSD. With 4.1 the patch and copy process works, WoW.exe even runs, but the launcher refuses to do anything, giving an "Insufficient space" error.

A blue post suggested deleting the data/cache folder as a workaround, but that was a terrible idea. Yes, the launcher is then happy but the play experience is unaccetable.

Buying a new, large, high-end SSD is not financially attractive. I had thought to perhaps pick up a second Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 and run the two drives in RAID 0. Unfortunately the Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 is obsolete and unavailable from mainstream online sources. I located stock in Latvia and China -- and even some in the US, but not at reasonable prices.


Hence, my questions:

How identical do drives have to be for RAID? My only experience with RAID is using RAID 1 with identical drives. Specifically could I get an Intel 320 Series SSDSA2CT040G3K5 and use it in RAID 0 with my existing Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5? They have the same controller chip and same nominal capacity. My motherboard has RAID support but I was thinking to make a Windows 7 striped volume. My understanding is that for RAID 0 setups the drives do not have to be identical.

Any other thoughts?

If you go with JBoD instead of RAID, it doesn't matter (JBoD is sorta like RAID 0, but the data isn't equally spaced across the disks).