Which Chipset for SSD RAID 0

[Bannon]

I just purchased two Corsair F240 SSDs and am planning to use them in a RAID 0 array either on the ICH10R controller on my current ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard or on the Intel controller SATA III ports on a P67 motherboard. This drive will be my C drive and I'll use it to store the operating system, programs (including games), music, photos, and the intermediate files when doing video encoding. The final video products will reside on a separate HDD. My question to the forum is will these drives perform appreciably different on the P67 motherboard even though they are SATA II drives? The rest of my current system specs are Windows 7 Home Premium, i7-980x, and 12GB memory.

 

[dac7nco]

Both chipsets are good in RAID-0; My only personal experience is with the ICH10R, which will scale your SSD's performance quite well in a 2-drive RAID-0, with diminishing (speed) returns with 3 drives, 4 drives...etc. Why RAID-0 at all?

Daimon

P.S.- I've heard some impressive results regarding Intel's SATA-III controllers, but haved never used them myself.

 

[Bannon]

Good question and I think the simple answer is to eek out the maximum performance from the system/drives and to make maximum and most flexible use of the storage space. I've made two assumptions that helped make that decision. The first is that the increased reliability of SSDs mitigates the risk inherent in RAID 0 configurations and that the high IOPS potential of these drives eliminates the bottleneck of having your OS, Pagefile, temporary video work files, etc. on the same drive.

 

[dac7nco]

No, I mean why RAID-0 with SSDs when you'll lose TRIM support?

Daimon

 

[Bannon]

Ah! Another good question. I am under the impression that Sandforce drives have good enough built in garbage collection that makes the loss of Trim inconsequential. If that is not the case then RAID 0 is not something I will pursue.

 

[Nothinman]

TRIM and garbage collection aren't the same thing. The drive's firmware can't know a block is really free unless the OS tells it so because it can't understand every filesystem out there.

And SSDs aren't infallible just because they don't have moving parts. Yes that lowers the likelihood, but memory, power supplies, random motherboard components, etc all fail too.

 

[Bannon]

I could've misunderstood something I heard about the loss of Trim on Sandforce drives. I understood that is wasn't significant because of their garbage collection capabilities. If The performance of Sandforce drives decays over time without Trim then I will NOT RAID these drives.

 

[Nothinman]

I've heard the same thing but I don't trust it. Essentially it's a black box that they won't explain that's supposed to intelligently manage data that it can't really understand, that sounds damn scary to me. Especially since I'm on Linux so I wouldn't be using FAT or NTFS on the thing which is probably all they've tested it on. And even then I'd still be leery because there's so many minor revisions of NTFS and MS adds things that change the on-disk layout occasionally so who knows what versions they've tested with.