SSD's, RAID, and TRIM

[Bolas]

Just heard that the latest Intel firmware enables TRIM for SSD's set up in RAID. If so... this is a game changer for boot drives, and two or more SSD's in RAID-0 will be the fastest setup and will not significantly degrade over time.

I'm curious, would this mean that TRIM works on an OCZ Z-drive?

Also, what would now be the best setup for overall performance? Would it be best to get a pcie plus ssd raid card like the Z-Drive?

Or would it be better to get a pair of 160GB X-25M G2's and use RAID-0 from the motherboard? Or use four 80GB X-25M G2's? Or a pair of Crucial RealSSD C300's with a SATA 6GB/s motherboard?

Anyone have any idea what would work the best as far as boot times and program load times for around $1000?

 

[Rubycon]

Stick with a single drive. Unless you need 320GB of space that RAID0 offers adding a second disk does little to improve load/boot times. Boot times actually INCREASE with a RAID setup due to the controller BIOS checks, etc.

 

[obamaliar]

Just heard that the latest Intel firmware enables TRIM for SSD's set up in RAID. If so... this is a game changer for boot drives, and two or more SSD's in RAID-0 will be the fastest setup and will not significantly degrade over time.

I'm curious, would this mean that TRIM works on an OCZ Z-drive?

Also, what would now be the best setup for overall performance? Would it be best to get a pcie plus ssd raid card like the Z-Drive?

Or would it be better to get a pair of 160GB X-25M G2's and use RAID-0 from the motherboard? Or use four 80GB X-25M G2's? Or a pair of Crucial RealSSD C300's with a SATA 6GB/s motherboard?

Anyone have any idea what would work the best as far as boot times and program load times for around $1000?

it does support raid trim for all but raid5
and here is why you want raid

the only people that say its no good say it cause they dont have it

 

[obamaliar]

Just heard that the latest Intel firmware enables TRIM for SSD's set up in RAID. If so... this is a game changer for boot drives, and two or more SSD's in RAID-0 will be the fastest setup and will not significantly degrade over time.

I'm curious, would this mean that TRIM works on an OCZ Z-drive?

Also, what would now be the best setup for overall performance? Would it be best to get a pcie plus ssd raid card like the Z-Drive?

Or would it be better to get a pair of 160GB X-25M G2's and use RAID-0 from the motherboard? Or use four 80GB X-25M G2's? Or a pair of Crucial RealSSD C300's with a SATA 6GB/s motherboard?

Anyone have any idea what would work the best as far as boot times and program load times for around $1000?

run off mb with 4 x-25m and it will be smoking fast, trim will not work on the z drive and the 4 x25m's will be faster anyway

 

[obamaliar]

here is why the new rst driver is better:

 

[Rubycon]

it does support raid trim for all but raid5
and here is why you want raid

the only people that say its no good say it cause they dont have it

Actually I DO have a PROPER raid in hardware not Intel FAKERAID set up. IMO putting more than one SSD on a motherboard is a waste. The OP wants to see increases in load times and adding more drives does not at all!

If one has a need for sustained reads and writes (I do!) then by all means go for it! Hitch them to a real host and let it fly.

I can tell you that there is NO difference in load times between systems I have here. One has a single X25 160GBG2 SSD and the other has 12SSDs on an ARC1680ix-24 w/4GB cache that benches over 1.8GB/S. Copy performance with big files is where that shines.

Opening programs they are both very much the same. Matter of fact the single SSD system boots up a lot faster because it does not have a RAID BIOS to sit through on boot up.

You won't have trim (yet) on a hardware solution however you can use drives with built in garbage collection which has about 10% overhead in iops. With the cache on the controller you won't see it AND STR is mostly independent of IOPs and that's why you would have such a setup in the first place.

 

[Bolas]

I don't spend a lot of time copying large files or anything like that. I mostly boot up, launch programs, surf the web, play video games. Not a lot of file manipulation or copying.

I don't have a ton of space requirements either, so probably a single Intel x25-m G2 160GB for the boot drive would be plenty. I can throw any video, audio, or image files onto a bulk storage data drive, I'm mainly just trying to find out what setup will be the best for the main task I do -- boot up, launching programs, loading levels within 3d games (like Everquest or Orange Box).

Is it worth it to get a Sata 6GB/s motherboard and SSD(s)? Or would I not notice any difference over the Intel SSD?

 

[Rubycon]

I don't spend a lot of time copying large files or anything like that. I mostly boot up, launch programs, surf the web, play video games. Not a lot of file manipulation or copying.

I don't have a ton of space requirements either, so probably a single Intel x25-m G2 160GB for the boot drive would be plenty. I can throw any video, audio, or image files onto a bulk storage data drive, I'm mainly just trying to find out what setup will be the best for the main task I do -- boot up, launching programs, loading levels within 3d games (like Everquest or Orange Box).

Is it worth it to get a Sata 6GB/s motherboard and SSD(s)? Or would I not notice any difference over the Intel SSD?

Definitely a single 160GB X25 will fit the bill perfectly in your case!
A 6Gbps SATA port is nice for future drives that have this capability. Intel should be releasing one this fall. It won't make current generation (3Gbps SATA) any faster, however.

 

[rolodomo]

Actually I DO have a PROPER raid in hardware not Intel FAKERAID set up. IMO putting more than one SSD on a motherboard is a waste. The OP wants to see increases in load times and adding more drives does not at all!

This raises an interesting issue I wished was tested more. I've read Intel "Fakeraid" works well with SSD(s) because the integrated chipset introduces very little extra latency and because, at least in simpler RAID configurations, introduces very little processor overhead. The sophisticated caching in hardware RAID however is geared to reducing the mechanical latency in hard drives, and thus actually introduces significant latency when SSD(s) are used.

 

[=Wendy=]

ICHxxR works well for RAID SSD's in benchmarks, in the real world there is nothing can touch real hardware RAID.
I also agree with Ruby, that RAID0 won't do much for normal users, unless they need to move around very large files between drives, and latency doesn't really matter a whole lot for that.

The big thing made about 4K random writes being the holy grail for SSD, has done little than cause confusion for normal users, why?
Because most normally users will never even come close to using the 4k write bandwidth available on a single SSD, never mind a RAID0 setup. 4K random writes is only a problem if you don't have enough of them (Jmicron early SSD controller).

At the moment, the Sandforce drives are technically the fastest mainstream SSDs available. They easily out pace even the G2 for 4K, yet in the real world, you simply can't tell if a Vertex, G2, or Sandforce is faster in normal use, simply because normal mainstream users come nowhere close to maxing out 4K bandwidth, or any other area where a particular SSD shines.

BTW: I do have a fast HW SSD based RAID0, It's only used for testing the real world copy speeds of other SSDs

 

[vj8usa]

here is why you want raid

the only people that say its no good say it cause they dont have it

I don't get it. You're saying we should want RAID because it gives better scores on benchmarks? My green bar just doubled, woopty doo!

For the kind of stuff that the OP (and most people, myself included) do, RAID 0 won't make an appreciable performance difference.

 

[Rubycon]

A proper firmware in a smarthost can identify a member disk by its SMART attribute that it's NOT a mechanical disk and adjust its parameters accordingly for best throughput. Using a firmware that cannot do this can reduce performance however it still will far excel in scaling with increasing number of disks as well as have its hardware cache to work with.

 

[Bolas]

Definitely a single 160GB X25 will fit the bill perfectly in your case!
A 6Gbps SATA port is nice for future drives that have this capability. Intel should be releasing one this fall. It won't make current generation (3Gbps SATA) any faster, however.

Actually, the Crucial RealSSD C300 drives already have the 6 GB/s SATA capability. That's specifically what I'm asking about.

Crucial RealSSD C300 with Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard = SATA 6 GB/s for both, and both available at NewEgg.

How would that perform compared to, say, Intel X25-M G2 SSD with EVGA Classified motherboard? Would there be any noticeable difference from my point of view?

 

[Rubycon]

Actually, the Crucial RealSSD C300 drives already have the 6 GB/s SATA capability. That's specifically what I'm asking about.

Crucial RealSSD C300 with Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard = SATA 6 GB/s for both, and both available at NewEgg.

How would that perform compared to, say, Intel X25-M G2 SSD with EVGA Classified motherboard? Would there be any noticeable difference from my point of view?

Not at all.

Now if your plan of purchase can wait until true enthusiast level boards have SATA 6Gbps then sure go for it!

 

[Bolas]

Not at all.

Now if your plan of purchase can wait until true enthusiast level boards have SATA 6Gbps then sure go for it!

My monitors arrived today. My current computers can't power them. Longest I could wait would be two weeks for the release of the Asus Rampage III Extreme board.

Motherboards I'm considering:

Asus Rampage III Extreme
EVGA Classified SR-2
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

 

[Rubycon]

My monitors arrived today. My current computers can't power them. Longest I could wait would be two weeks for the release of the Asus Rampage III Extreme board.

Motherboards I'm considering:

Asus Rampage III Extreme
EVGA Classified SR-2
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

The SR-2 is a dual processor (Xeon only) board not even the same class as the other two. Asus ROG boards are not built very well and burn out easy. Of course I run things to 11 1/2.

 

[Bolas]

The SR-2 is a dual processor (Xeon only) board not even the same class as the other two. Asus ROG boards are not built very well and burn out easy. Of course I run things to 11 1/2.

Yep, I know it's a dual processor, but it's a dual processor that can be overclocked and that has seven PCIe slots, twelve memory slots, USB 3.0, and Sata III (6 GB/s). Which is quite nice, all in all. I was going to get that one until I saw that none of the six core Xeon processors were under $1k, and paying $2k for slow chips with locked multipliers that don't even have the courtesy of being an odd number rather than an even one = I'd probably be happier with a 980X or a good old 920 D0.

I didn't know that ROG boards weren't built well, hadn't heard that much before. I have, however, met some rabid Rampage II Extreme fans on various boards. I'd probably get a Classified, except for the lack of USB 3.0 and Sata 6GB/s.

Sounds like you're recommending the Gigabyte board, with it's "mucho copper" backplane. I could see that one as being a good pick. I even like the blue color scheme better than the red color scheme, just wish it was a darker shade of blue.

 

[Rubycon]

Haven't had a Gigabyte board in years. Mostly because my broker doesn't buy them. Way back in the day (early 2000s) when everyone was using electrolytic caps they were victim to bad caps and thus most of the P4 boards are not working today.

The Classified is a solid board and seems to o/c well especially if you plan on pushing things really hard.

The ASUS WS line of boards seem to work very well too. My biggest gripe with all of the X58 boards (except the 4X SLI Classified 762 which uses Marvell) is the Realtek Lan controllers. These boards should be using Marvell/Broadcom/Intel considering their price! Realtek does work well with our procurve switches but some complain of issues. I know they do NOT like PCI-E overclocking!

SATA3/USB3 is quite new NOW so not too many boards featuring it. Both are welcome technologies as USB3 opens up the door to fast removable storage that's truly plug and play and SATA3 6Gbps adds more bandwidth for newer solid state drives. The Micron 256GB model is supposedly a lot faster than the 128 due to internal striping and having 6Gbps helps tremendously.

 

[Bolas]

Well I took the plunge and bought a cpu today at microcenter. It's a regular core i7 and not a xeon, so I will not be buying the SR-2 board.

So many interesting motherboards out these days it's tough to choose.

 

[slayernine]

I wish could afford enough Intel SSD's to throw in a RAID 0

Though if I was still doing business consulting I would probably take this as the cue to start making servers with those drives. With trim support on RAID you at least know it will be running decently for a longer duration.

 

[Yellowbeard]

2 very relevent links:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3778

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=4304877&postcount=987

 

[Bolas]

2 very relevent links:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3778

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=4304877&postcount=987

Yep, I ended up going with a single X25-M G2 SSD. Thanks for all the advice!

I'm leaning towards the Rampage III Extreme motherboard. It's just tough to wait for it to come out when my lovely monitors are sitting on my desk with nothing to power them. Pretty sure my laptop can't drive even one 30" display at native resolution.

 

[slayernine]

N7 should post his triple RAID 0 with his intel G1 and two G2's

It gets around 750 mb/s seq read

 

[AnalyticalGuy]

My goal is to minimize the time it takes to:
1) Boot Windows 7, plus
2) Load anti-virus (AV), plus
3) Allow the AV to scan startup files, plus
4) Allow the AV to download updates, plus
5) Load several applications into RAM.

Question: Would this be faster with:
A) One Intel 160GB G2 SSD, or
B) Two independent (i.e., no RAID involved) Intel 80GB G2 SSDs -- One for Win 7 and the other for AV and applications?

 

[taltamir]

Just heard that the latest Intel firmware enables TRIM for SSD's set up in RAID

Any drive with TRIM is capable of doing trim in RAID, it is the RAID controller that is is incapable.

the latest intel driver for intel motherboard raid controller lets it transmit trim command, making such motherboard raid be trim enabled for all drives, intel and non intel.