Help: Ssd raid

[interc3eptor]

Hi all.

I am hoping to get some help from you guys regarding a SSD setup I would like reach.

At the moment, I have Kingston SSD NOW V+ Series 64GB (SNVP325-S2B/64GB)

I have Win 7 currently installed on it and I use 1TB WD Black SATA3 Driver for storage.

Now, I am building a home entairtainment PC and I would like to take my 1TB and use it in that new PC, while leaving SSD drive in my main rig (gaming).

I am thinking on getting a one more SSD drive (as same as the one I have) and put it in raid, which will give me cca 120 GB for OS and application and games, which would satisfy my space needs.

Now, I have two questions:

1. Is it possible to raid these two SSD drives?
2. If YES, how? (I have never done raid in my life, so I have no idea)

I have core i7 950 on X58-UD3R motherboard.

I would appreciate the help guys.

Thanks in advance.

 

[SkopjeMKD]

1. Yes

2. Intel X58 based motherboards have a very capable raid chip, I myself run 4 x SSDs in Raid0 (check this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2118287)

It's very easy to set it up, connect the drives, make sure you use the correct ports for raid support, you have differently colored ports, ones for 3GBit ones for 6GBit/s - I don't think the 6Gbit/s support raid so safe bet is to go with the ICH10R ports for Raid 0.

Once connected, boot the PC, in the Bios set the Storage type from IDE or ACHI > to RAID. This enables the onboard Raid controller. Save & Exit. During boot, after the first boot screen, you will see the Intel Raid Storage controller initializing, click CTRL + I to enter the Raid setup and follow the instructions, it's pretty straight forward.

One down side is, there is no TRIM support in raid0 for SSDs. TRIM is used basically to Zero-delete the empty space on an SSD drive to avoid garbage piling up. But there are manual work arounds like downloading a tool named AS Cleaner 0.5 (FreeSpaceCleaner) and running it once a month.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

While you can RAID the 2 SSD's, let me tell you you aren't going to see much if any difference in "games". The system will benchmark faster with bigger storage numbers, but in RL usage with "games" you aren't going to see any real difference than if you just run the game off of individual SSD's.

The downside to RAID'ing SSD's in your case is that your boot time from power-on will take longer (RAID controller has to initialize and find drives) and with the assumption that you want to use a striped RAID for performance (versus mirrored for pseudo-redundancy), if one SSD starts messing up for any reason, you lose the data on both drives.

I have tried 4+ SSD's in different RAID setups with both the Intel x58 and Win7 built-in software raid and while interesting to benchmark, real-world gaming is nearly unchanged from just running the games from one SSD. Resource-intense gaming experience is contrained by the other parts of your system more than the SSD in any RAID setup.

With relatively much slower hard drives, RAID can make a big improvement, with already fast SSD's unless you are doing something very specific, gaming is not one the the tasks that take advantage of SSD's in RAID setups that make it a worthwhile endeavor (considering the drawbacks). Of course, if you are just trying stuff out, GO FOR IT! Just that you aren't going to see much difference in "normal" computer activities (and no benchmarking is not a normal activity .

FYI: I currently have Fallout New Vegas loading from a 4-SSD Striped arrary (last setup I had played) and the game doesn't seem to load any faster than just playing it from an individual SSD. I'm sure the RAID "is" faster, but perceptually on the human level, it's a wash.

The interesting thing is that with 2 SSD's in a striped array, the Win7 software-only RAID was significantly faster than Intel's. Unfotunately, you can't boot to a Win7 striped RAID.

 

[mv2devnull]

Stripe size. The "RL usage" should spread nicely over the drives, and adjusting stripe size is a way to optimize that.

Perhaps the MS RAID driver takes shortcuts that the Intel one cannot/won't?

2. Intel X58 based motherboards have a very capable raid chip,

that does next to nothing. All the "RAID functionality" is in software. But as a SATA-drive controller it does a sterling job.

 

[interc3eptor]

Well I am aware that there is no big significant performance boost, I am doing this to have more space for OS stuff, it was either this or selling ssd and going velociraptor 150 in raid 0, but again it would mean I would need to sell my ssd and then buy new drives and cofigure everything, whille ssd is probably a bit better than velociraptors. So quickest solution is to just buy one more same ssd and have enough space for everything

Skopje, hvala makedonac