Questions for a new RAID 0 setup

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jamsomito

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I recently purchased a second SSD, the same size as the first (though, different manufacturers and models). I was thinking about trying a RAID 0 config for fun. Neither of these SSD's are flagship devices, so the extra performance while increasing capacity on a "single" drive sounds nice too. I am aware of the risks and intend to set Macrium Reflect to create a drive image once every couple days to an external 4TB hard drive, and I'll keep at minimum 2 images in case it screws up while writing one.

I just have some questions:
1. My motherboard is an MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) with a 2500k (non OC, but I'm thinking it's time - I fiddled with it before and got 4.4 GHz). It supports RAID 0/1/5/10. Does this mean it has a dedicated RAID controller, or will it be using CPU to emulate?
1a. In either case, will I notice a hit on CPU performance?

2. Can I make a RAID 0 with similarly sized, but non-identical drives?

3. I'd like to keep my OS install, so I was going to image my current SSD to my external drive, format both SSD's, create the RAID, and restore the image to the SSD RAID array. Is this a flawed approach?

Any other tips for a noob? Thanks all.
 
Does this mean it has a dedicated RAID controller, or will it be using CPU to emulate?
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The CPU does the raid. Under windows the raid5 performance is bad however raid0, raid1 or raid10 are useable.

In either case, will I notice a hit on CPU performance?
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I say except raid5 (where the problem is the lack of a working write back cache) not really. Remember most hardware raid cards have something like a 700 MHz power pc processor which are much less powerful than a modern processor.

Can I make a RAID 0 with similarly sized, but non-identical drives?
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Yes

the extra performance while increasing capacity
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Don't expect extra performance outside of large sequential operations and benchmarks that use large sequential operations. RAID0 does not improve 4K reads or writes.
 
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drescherjm said:
Don't expect extra performance outside of large sequential operations and benchmarks that use large sequential operations. RAID0 does not improve 4K reads or writes.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate the comments on performance, I really don't know what to expect. However, I do a lot of photo and video dumps and edits, so I think that would still be beneficial. I'll make a working directory on this drive, then transfer to my external drive for storage.
 
yes diffferent drives of same size works but it'll run as fast as the slowest drive.

those RAID card CPUs are ASIC though so they are designed to do what they do unlike a modern CPU but yes they are weak. There is also a difference from a cheap RAID card verse a good RAID card. Good RAID cards are better than software RAID but i'll tkae software RAID over cheap RAID card any day.
 
So would it be better to set it up through my BIOS (Z68 chipset), or Windows 10?
 
isn't an IRST RAID a raid using intel software? That would be the best way. I never used RST personally. I always used windows for my RAID 0 out of pure laziness.
 
Ok, so next question. If I clone my boot drive to the RAID array, Windows won't know it's configured in a RAID, correct? Is this method going to work?
 
You can clone a drive on RST and the boot should work. Or at least I have had success cloning a raid5 on RST with clonezilla to a single drive and then back to a RAID10 on RST with windows 8.1 as the OS here at work on the machine I am typing from..
 
trueimage can do that without an issue but costs money. If dresch says coonezilla works i would trust him.
 
Alright, I'll give clonezilla a try, thanks. I've only used Macrium Reflect before, but I can't imagine it being too difficult.
 
BTW, I created the destination raid array in the BIOS before running clonezilla. Then had clonezilla clone to the array.
 
So I'm using Clonezilla - created and checked my boot drive image, all is well. I made the RAID 0 drive in the intel software / BIOS. Went back into Clonezilla, but apparently it won't work with this configuration - it just sees both drives individually. Is there software that can restore my image to the "software" array?
 
jamsomito said:
So I'm using Clonezilla - created and checked my boot drive image, all is well. I made the RAID 0 drive in the intel software / BIOS. Went back into Clonezilla, but apparently it won't work with this configuration - it just sees both drives individually. Is there software that can restore my image to the "software" array?
Click to expand...
if you cant get clonezilla to work you can get TrueImage and if it doesn't work they have a money back guarantee.

Clonezilla should work though.
 
It's not seeing the RAID...

I tried a spare IDE drive through a PCI adapter and everything sees that fine too. So I tried installing windows on that to use Macrium Reflect to restore the image to the RAID, but all Windows install sees is the RAID! So frustrating...

Trying Clonezilla in Ubuntu from a USB stick next.
 
Just boot to Windows with your current boot drive as well as the raid. Make sure Windows understands the array. Then use Macrium to image the array
 
Current boot drive became part of the array. The spare I put in (IDE) actually had Win7 on it, and it boots to Windows recovery, but won't boot to the OS. Trying to figure this out but I'm stumped for now.
 
Ok, so I realized that clonezilla will work the same regardless of where you run it from. So here's what I'm thinking of trying now. I flashed my Macrium Reflect image to the RAID array (after flashing it to my IDE drive and booting to that). Windows will not boot on the RAID array, but Windows Recovery will. So I booted back into my IDE drive and I'm creating a Windows backup image right now.

Things to try:
1. Boot to Windows Recovery from the RAID and restore the backup image I'm making now.
2. If that doesn't work, install fresh copy of Windows 7 on RAID because I know that recognizes it, upgrade to Windows 10, then restore the Windows 10 recovery I'm making now.

I'm thinking #2 should work. Thoughts?
 
Well, I was gearing up to do those, but thanks to groebuck in this thread, all I had to do was boot to safe mode, then restart and it was up and running!

Pretty stoked. Thanks everyone for the help.

Edit: here's a quick bench.

XNpNqug.jpg
 
Well I got what was coming to me. Drive died last night and I lost the array. LOL

I have a backup from a week ago which is perfect. Problem is, my image is now larger than a single drive. I'm using Macrium Reflect, which has always worked great for me in the past. I can restore an image larger than the destination disk so long as only free space puts it over. Unfortunately, I had a working directory on there for photo/video editing that was 80GB. I have that backed up, so I don't need to restore those files. I can mount the image with Macrium, see the files and delete them, but it reverts any changes to the image when I dismount it.

I've searched for about a half an hour and can't find if it is possible to modify a Macrium image from within or outside of the program. Does anyone know a way to do this? Does the paid version allow it? Another piece of software? My backup solution is to buy a larger drive, there's a good deal on a 512GB 850 EVO right now, but I'd rather save the money if I can.

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
I'm surprised it failed in only a couple months. Did you secure erase and re-initialize both disk to see if a disk actually failed? Sometimes non-enterprise drives can drop from RAID.

Also, may be a good time to re-evaluation your 'need' for RAID 0. Other than sequential speeds you're not gaining anything on SSD's really. Back in the day on mechanical disk, spreading the load among more spindles helped in IO demanding applications but that shouldn't be an issue with a single SSD for a personal computer.

Other than l337 benchmarks, how often do you sequentially write files that demand that speed and outweigh the risk? If you truly need this configuration, you would be better suited for RAID 10. If it's a 'need' the money shouldn't be an issue. Just a thought.
 
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It might not be an issue specific to your case, but that's one of the reasons I always use same drives for raid arrays. Might not be an issue, but then again it might.
 
Oh I never said I needed it, just wanted to try. I do a lot of photo and video editing, copying files from one drive to another and loading them into editing programs, just wanted to see how big a difference it would make (none, now in my experience), and give it a whirl to learn about it.

I did have a mixture of drives in there, though they were the same size. One of them was a couple years old - Kingston KC300. I actually RMAd a Kingston V+200 because of failure and they sent this in return. Not going to be buying any more Kingston budget drives.

Anyone know specifics of image manipulation? I'm one step away from getting everything back together again, I just need to delete this folder from the Macrium image...
 
Whelp, too many other projects going on right now so I took the easy way out. Made an order for a 480GB drive.

Thanks for all the help though.
 
Ok, so the new drive is still en route, but I had some time this evening to futz with stuff. I played around for an hour with the guts of my PC hanging out the back of the motherboard tray, trying every combination of SATA connection point and power connector. I'm still not 100% positive, but I'm fairly certain it's a bad power cable. It intermittently recognizes drives (or not at all) after the first SATA power connector on the cable (there are 4). If I connect one drive to the first, and the second drive to another connector on a different power cable, it boots.

This is a Seasonic PSU that's been working flawlessly for 3 years or so... why would a cable connector go bad after this amount of use and without ever being touched (buried inside the case)? Really confused about that, but I suppose stranger things have happened.
 
And now I have a speed boost? PC feels much more snappy too (could be in my head). Check out 4k read. This is so strange... could bad power cause a RAID array to work more slowly? I would have figured it either works or it doesn't.

A2v6BCS.jpg


Thoughts?

old bench:
jamsomito said:
XNpNqug.jpg
Click to expand...
 
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