Hardware raid recommendations for running 3 Intel X25E SSD's

MooCow

MooCow

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 13, 2000
Messages
8,204
I am getting 3 intel X25e SSD's and am planning on running them in RAID0. There are so many RAID adapters out there and I'm not sure whether to go with 3ware, Adaptec, etc...

Also SAS cards will work with SATA drives, right? Cause in that case I would probably prefer to buy an SAS card to help me in the long run if I keep this card for a long time.

I'm looking for something thats at least PCI-e 4x. But when it comes to Intel SSD's, should I go w/ 8x? Or are most server level cards at 8x already?

Do Areca cards work well with Intel SSD's? Are there any known compatibility issues with RAID cards and SSD's?

Why 3? 4 will be coming soon. This is for an all in one gaming/Office rig. Serious replies only.
 
Last edited:
Areca 1210 or 1212 (if you want sas) and yes sas supports sata drives. They are both pcie 8x so plenty of bandwidth
 
That Areca 1212 looks good. Does the included cable connect straight to SATA?

Also how much more performance am I really gonna see, versus onboard RAID? Like Intel ICH ...
 
While I'm sure that other cards will catch up...
and you might only get a benefit with a pci-e 2.0 slot...

A raid controller costs more than a mobo or disk. If you're buying new, my opinion is to be future proof. If you upgrade your mobo or drives, you want your disk controller to work at full speed with the new setup.

If you're running 3 x25-e in raid, you're on the bleeding edge. Current high end ssd drives just about push sata 3g and pci-e 1.1 to the limit. If you want to be able to stay on the bleeding edge when new stuff comes out in 6-12 months, without junking the stuff you just bought.. Pick items that support pci-e 2.x and sas/sata 6g.

The newer LSI sas-2 cards will give you what you want, and will not be obsolete in six months. They support 3g and 6g sas, as well as 3g sata, and claim to support future 6g sata drives. The docs say that 1.5g sata is not supported at this time.

According to computurd's tests, they seem pretty fast with 8x ssd.

The 926x series supports 4 or 8 direct attached disks depending on model, or 30 - 32 disks via expanders. Cost $315-$600
The 928x (external) series supports 8 direct attached disks, or 200+ disks via expanders. Cost $700 - $900.
Not bad prices, for the latest tech.

I have a SAS 9280-8e on the way, and will try to replicate computurd's results.
I don't know if I will be able to, as my mobo doesn't allow changes to advance pci-e settings in the bios. But at least I know that I could buy a high end intel x58 or intel 5520 based board, to get the most out of the controller.
 
Do the latest intel motherboards come w/ decent onboard RAID chipsets? Its about time they put something good on them...

Oh yeah the other thing is the boot time, I know all RAID cards have some "delay" added into the boot times, but some of these cards are ridiculous, they report up to 14 seconds on the OCZ forums, thats kinda embarrassing if you're trying to show your friends on how fast SSD drives are. I might even have to draw the line on my buying decision based on boot/initialization times alone.

If you ever watch youtube videos on ssd boot times, its kinda shitty to see everything looking good, until this fucking - | / - \ cycle of text spinning around forever. Its no longer a fast boot because of this damned raid card doing its thing.
 
Last edited:
MooCow said:
...Oh yeah the other thing is the boot time, I know all RAID cards have some "delay" added into the boot times, but some of these cards are ridiculous...
Click to expand...

I don't see the point of worrying about boot time, but...

High end raid cards have their own mini-OS that needs to load, then initialize the drives, all before the system os loads. So there will be some delay when using a hardware raid card.

Spinning up 16 or 32 disks at the same time could overload the system power supply at start-up. To prevent blowing fuses or overloading of power supplies, the raid card may spin-up 2 disks at a time, with a delay of 2 seconds between each group of two disks. This creates additional delay at boot.
But overloading of power supplies and circuits might not be as much of an issue with a few ssd.

Some raid controllers come with command line utilities that allow you to adjust the number of disks that spin-up at once, and the delay between spin-up groups. If you wanted to, you could increase the number of disks that spin-up at once, or decrease the delay between spin-up groups.
 
very true simplesam, and when speaking of SSD there is no need for spin up at all, they require negligible amounts of power. I have had several raid cards that allow you to change the spin-up settings from within the OS based GUI, no command line stuff needed!
 
Which cards, specifically? Do you have any experience w/ LSI vs Areca in those terms?
 
i have only had this one LSI, but i have had three highpoint/rocketraids, and several arecas. ALL have settings to adjust spin-up
 
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll take pics when I have it all set up and done, I typically have two separate machines, one for gaming, one for office/internet/email work. But this time I'm thinking of combining the two together and under that condition I must have all hardware "balls to the wall".

When the i7 34nm (34 or 32 nm??) comes out I'm going for that and then an ASUS Gene II board to go w/ it, then a full watercooling setup.
 
I'm personally waiting for the Gulftown/Core i9 processors to come out to build a dual six-core processor workstation. The new LSI 9260 line of raid cards certainly seem to do the job when it comes to ssd's...I'll have to give them a try too :)
 
the LSI cannot be beat tbh...there is no other raid card that my array has not virtually overran, yet the 9260 just begs for more! The previous champ,l the areca 1680-ix, i would have to take drives off it to get over a gb/s, because it would just swamp the IOP
DSCF0397.jpg

DSCF2885-1.jpg
 
Last edited:
Saw those pics on the OCZ forums, its like a case thats front is on the side, CDrom on the side...
 
are they gonna be 6 gb/s compatible? if they are i am excited as well!~ Love those arecas!
 
I had no idea that down the road, I'd have to be spending as much dough on hard drive controllers as I do on video cards. Like at first it was something you didn't have to worry about, the motherboard took care of it. But now hard drives are catching up so fast that they max out the capabilities of onboard sata.
 
I'm getting much slower write speeds w/ my X25e... do I have to use the same exact tweaks as the OCZ users do?

Edit: Its Intel's lack of TRIM support, isn't it?
 
Last edited:
Compared to when you first benchmark the drives, you get 200MB/s write, after a while it falls to 100MB/s write. This is when I use ATTO disk benchmark.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top