Newbie RAID question

[pm]

I have an Intel SSD and I recently bought another. They are both the same model and size. Right now I have an Asus P8P67 motherboard with the SSD as the boot drive to Windows, and then I have a 1TB drive that I have mapped to c:\users. The BIOS has the drives set up as ACHI.

I want to install RAID0 on the two SSD's. I made a clone of the drive using Clonezilla and stuck it on the 1TB drive. I went into the BIOS and enabled RAID for the drives and then wasn't fast enough on boot and it tried to boot into Windows and then blue-screened and rebooted.

So my main question is why didn't it boot into Windows after I switched the BIOS from ACHI to RAID? Do I need to preinstall a RAID driver for Windows?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, Windows must have the RAID driver installed, if the BIOS is set to RAID mode, otherwise it cannot boot.

 

[boochi]

You will probably be a little disappointed with the performance gains with RAID0 on SSD's. The performance gains are not really noticeable as with traditional harddrives. I have ran as many as 3 in RAID0 and the performance gain was negligible.

 

[BrightCandle]

In raid 0 you also currently loose trim support, which can reduce performance during heavy write periods quite a lot.

 

[pm]

Thanks, Larry. Based on your reply, I did a bunch of googling and found one registry entry that needed to be changed, and life is good.

I didn't know about the TRIM thing. That's a bummer.

As far as performance, We had a 6 drive RAID0 Intel SSD 310 array in the lab and it scaled petty much exactly linearly with the drives. We had something like a 1.4Gb/s sequential read rate in A-SSD... I'll have to look at the screenshot we took, but we got great performance out of that RAID array. M

I found out last night that Clonezilla doesn't support firmware RAID0, so I'm still RAIDless.

 

[jhansman]

In addition to losing TRIM, you also run the risk of losing your boot drive in RAID 0 if one of the SSDs eats it. Yes, you can image your install as insurance, but as others have pointed out, the performance gains probably do not offset the risks.

 

[Emulex]

some controllers let you setup raid-1 for boot, or jbod/jbod then use the rest of the drive for raid-0.

raid-0 for boot, and raid-1 for rest also works but quite honestly raid-0 it all and backup daily (or more) - two junky sandforce drives = 500mb/s read/write (sandforce bench style) and quite honestly it is stupid fast.

I'm about to raid 4 kingston drives in raid-0 for a sql server test - i suspect it will be stupid fast on iops.

some drives have better garbage collection than others. - but for $90 for a v+ samsung 128gb - 4 of those puppies in raid-0 should be quite fun. gotta love the deals these days.