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RAID 0 or not? Need suggestions.

B

Bad_dude

Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2002
Messages
936
Hello every one,
I am pretty knowledgeable about PC hardware but I have been away for a little bit so I would imagine the SDDs handle the data a little differently.
Here's my system specs:
-Intel i920 Overclock to 4Ghz. Corsair H50.
-Motherboard, Asus P6T with the latest BIOS 1408.
-24GB or RAM tri channel.
-Video Sapphire Dirt 3 6950 2GB.
-LSI SAS3442E-R PCI Express SATA / SAS Controller Card . I have been using this card to run RAID 0 with two 1TB WD Black 64MB cache. Do you guys think that this card will overhead running RAID 0 with the Force 3 SSDs?
-Sound cards, modded Creative Xtreme Music PCI and Xonar DG PCI.
-I got about 8 other hard drives for my data ranging from 1TB to 2TB. I do lots of video work and Adobe stuffs so I need the storage. So all of my data go on these drives.
-I also squeeze in some PC gaming when I get a chance so I would think installing my games on the SSDs will give me best performance. Would installing the games on the SSDs are better or just put the game cache on the SSDs better for gaming?
-Since I will only have about 220GB total on the SSDs in RAID 0, should I install all of my big software on the WD Black RAID 0 and put the software cache on the SSDs for best performance?

-I want to use the new Force 3 120GB drives as my main windows drives in RAID 0. Here are my questions that need some suggestions:
a) Should I use the LSI controller or the onboard Intel RAID 0 for my SSDs? Which one will give me the fastest boot and response time.
b) How could I setup my system to extend the life and performance of my SSDs drives? From reading, I think the SSDs drives decrease in speed over time due to the more you write to the drives. I would like to minimize this problem and keep it running fastest over time.

-I have read some where that running RAID 0, I won't get TRIM support. Which one is faster to go with, TRIM or RAID 0?
-Intel latest drivers support TRIM in RAID 0, but I think my motherboard bios needs to have the latest Intel BIOS built in as my older X58 won't have it. I read some where that you could modify the BIOS to support TRIM in RAID 0 with this older X58, any one experience with it?

Please help with suggestions and any that I have mentioned. I am going to setup my system this coming week.

Thanks for the suggested help. I do have some ideas on the setup but I would like to get the best ways as I just want to this once for a long while.
 
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Your SAS/SATA controller does not support SATA 6Gbps, hence it will limit each Force 3 SSD to about 250-300 MB/s while it should be able to deliver almost 500 MB/s sequential performance on a SATA 6Gbps interface. Apart from that RAID0 is not particularly taxing to the controller.

Intel supports TRIM in RAID0, but only on Z77 chipsets. I have no experience with Sanforce based SSD, but I read that if they are used without TRIM, their performance will severly degrade over time. I would recommend to leave about 15% of the space free.

Personally I would buy the largest possible single SSD and just use it as a plain drive.
 
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