RAID 0 Woes....

[ItsAlive]

I have an LSI 8344ELP raid controller card with 2 OCZ SSDs 30GB model, and I am trying to do raid 0 stripped across both drives. The problem is when I try to set up the array it will only show 2 physical drives and when I go to install windows 7 it will only partition the drives as 2 seperate drives. I cant find any options in the controllers bios to set this to stripped although I know it is possible per the manufactures specs on the card.

Anyone have any ideas on a fix or am I overlooking some minor detail? Any help is appreciated.

 

[ItsAlive]

haha, solved my own problem......when adding disks to disk group I had to hold control key and highlight all disks to add both disks to the group. I new it was something simple LOL....

Thanks AT you rock!

 

[bigi]

Give us your thoughts how it works. I want to do the same with 3ware, but waiting for new drivers that hopefully will support SSDs well.

 

[ItsAlive]

Well so far the LSI controller is working great. Although, I have a few quibbles with it.

Likes:
1) Was the cheapest 4x pci-e card I could find.
2) Gets good performance, 280mb/s reads 180mb/s writes with raid 0 and ATTO bench
3) 128mb onboard cache
4) Fairly easy to configure




Cons:
1) Beeps loudly at first boot up.
2) Gets pretty warm after a few minutes.
3) Adds about 30 sec to boot time to Initialize.
4) Long card covers sata ports on my motherboard (could be fault of mobo tho)

This is the first hardware controller I have used. Other than the very vague directions of how to add disks to the disk group, I had no problems with installation or configuration. The performance of 2 drives is outstanding. I notice no stuttering, slow downs or hitching of any kind and my applications install about 5x faster than on my WD spindle drive. I did notice a performance drop occasionally when the cache is filled on the card. I attribute this to the card only having 128mb. I think performance would be markedly better had there been 256mb. Im glad I got this card, despite its few flaws it was half the cost of every other card in its class and does exactly what I need it to. I will be testing with 4x SSDs in raid 0 soon, I will post those numbers just as soon as the drives arrive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: ItsAlive
Well so far the LSI controller is working great. Although, I have a few quibbles with it.

Likes:
1) Was the cheapest 4x pci-e card I could find.
2) Gets good performance, 280mb/s reads 180mb/s writes with raid 0 and ATTO bench
3) 128mb onboard cache
4) Fairly easy to configure

Cons:
1) Beeps loudly at first boot up.
2) Gets pretty warm after a few minutes.
3) Adds about 30 sec to boot time to Initialize.
4) Long card covers sata ports on my motherboard (could be fault of mobo tho)

This is the first hardware controller I have used. Other than the very vague directions of how to add disks to the disk group, I had no problems with installation or configuration. The performance of 2 drives is outstanding. I notice no stuttering, slow downs or hitching of any kind and my applications install about 5x faster than on my WD spindle drive. I did notice a performance drop occasionally when the cache is filled on the card. I attribute this to the card only having 128mb. I think performance would be markedly better had there been 256mb. Im glad I got this card, despite its few flaws it was half the cost of every other card in its class and does exactly what I need it to. I will be testing with 4x SSDs in raid 0 soon, I will post those numbers just as soon as the drives arrive.

I can't remember which LSI model was benchtested in the most recent performance comparison review I've read. Highpoint's 3510 card and a pricey Adaptec model were the top performers -- the award going to the Highpoint card for "bang for the buck." Whichever LSI RAID card was included in the comparison, it got some pretty severe thumbs down. I think the across-the-board feature of these boards was "RAID5-capable."

But it seems to work for you, so you probably saved some bucks while getting the performance you wanted.

 

[ItsAlive]

Yeah, I looked at the adaptecs (too expensive) and the highpoint rocket raids (pcie 1x). I would have went with the highpoint card, however with pcie 1x maxing out at 250mb/s and I planned on doing a raid 0 setup with 4 SSDs from the beginning. I would have been severly starved for bandwidth on a 1x slot. Not to mention with the adaptecs the only models I saw were either 1x or 8x which wouldnt work in my situation. There were only 2 cards I could find that were pcie 4x and had onboard cache. That was a 3ware card and this LSI card. I picked up the LSI card for $150 OEM and got a cable from ebay for $15. So far its been exactly what I was looking for.

 

[ItsAlive]

I got my drives today and got to do a bit of testing. I am running 2x30gb OCZ Solid Series, 1x64gb Patriot Warp V2, and 1x60gb OCZ Core Series drives in raid 0.

All in all I got a nice boost in performance from adding the other 2 drives. After the agonizing 12min. Windows 7 install, I ran ATTO bench and got a nice 420mb/s read, 420mb/s write speeds. I expected a little better read performance but the write performance is quite a bit higher than what I was expecting. Winrar installed in a blink of an eye (no exaggeration). I see no lag or stuttering, and everything is bascially instant. This setup is pretty expensive for an average user, but when comparing to intel SSDs I think the cost is justified. My only concern now is longevity of the drives and the added probablity of losing data that comes with a raid 0 setup.