PCI SSD vs RAID CARD and SATA SSD ????

[Mfusick]

Questions:

I have a Z68 Asus Deluxe with 8 SATA ports. 2 are IntelZ68 SATA3. 4 are SATA2. 2 additional are RAID possible with external Sata Controller (not intel Z68)

I have 4 120GB Vertex3 SSD's. I can do 2 in RAID 0 only on SATA3 on my motherboard.

I recently just flashed an IBM ServeRaid M1015 SAS/SATA PCI-e RAID Controller card to a PURE HBA SATA PORT CARD (or Basically flashed it into IT MODE of LSI SAS 9211-8i)

It got me wondering- could I use a x8 PCI SATA card to run 4 SSD's in RAID 0 since it seems my motherboard can only do 2 at once.

Is it worth it?

How would it perform compared to a real PCI SSD card ?

 

[kbp]

Can you even boot from a PCI SSD?
groberts may have more insite on this cause he may have this setup in his "arsenal".
But, I think you would be more than happy with a RAID-0 with all four of the drives on the SATA2 Intel ports. I would think any bottleneck would be somewhere else in the system not the array or the ports.

 

[Mfusick]

A good SSD can saturate a sata II port ???? I think it can.

 

[kbp]

A good SSD can saturate a sata II port ???? I think it can.

ok....but that 300 X 4 all being fed at the same time. How much more data do you need to throw at it?

 

[Mfusick]

500MB + would be nicer...

Yes ?

 

[Emulex]

LSI WARP drive and Nytro are pretty cool setups. They basically drop 2-8 SSD's on the same board as the LSI megaraid controller.

The junky OCZ drives are just a simple sata controller with 4 drives, requiring software raid. sucky.

A good solution is to use SSD to cache raid-volumes.

Nytro can do up to 4TB of SSD to your raid-6 (say 8 RE4 4TB in raid-6) . If a drive fails, you can have the spare data on the SSD so rebuild times will not impact performance.

 

[JellyRoll]

You can get excellent performance with an 9265-8i or even a 9260 with fastpath.

 

[Mfusick]

How fast is raid0 vs SSD?

 

[JellyRoll]

Much faster, but you would need to have a heavy workload to see the benefits.

 

[groberts101]

don't even bother with the 1015/9211 for an OS volume as the uber fast R/W speeds won't even hold a candle to the lower latency and faster random performance see with those same 4 drives on the sata2 ports. Personally.. I'd R0 2 "faster than those V3's" on the Intel 6G ports for the OS volume.. and then run the V3's on the LSI card as a storage/caching volume. That way you end up with uber fast OS volume which can read and write at uber-fast speeds to the storage/cache volumes.

IMHO, far too many people get all caught up in uber-fast OS volumes and forget about the next biggest bottleneck on most systems. Storage.

Because having an OS volume that can read/write at 550MB/s compared to one that that can do 2GB/s is not going to be the 4 times faster that you would want it to be. The law of diminishing returns will creep in very quickly and you'll feel like you spent your load for no good reason.

However, when you combine an OS which can R/W at 2GB/s with a storage volume with similar speeds?.. you'll think your system is running striclty on RAM. Of course the time saved for each user toatally depends on what type and how much tarnsferring of larger data flows you need to do. To the typical user.. it will be like running a Ferrari motor with a 3,000 rpm rev limiter. Hardly worth the time and cash if you won't ever need to rev it.