• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

RAID0 with two or three SSD's

U

uniqueaccount

n00b
Joined
May 4, 2012
Messages
6
I'm really just looking for information on this subject as I'm looking to upgrade my personal PC performance. The reasons for this are epeen and improved loading times for everything from chrome to outlook to BF3, GW2, etc. I play games and I work from home a decent amount. I have money, but I don't want to needlessly blow it either. So cost/performance ratio is important to me, but I may be on the higher end of the scale regarding how much I'm willing to spend.

Backstory (Skip if you want/don't care): My current PC is a few years old, I bought it shortly after i7 was released. It's an i7 920, 6 gigs of ddr3 800ish RAM. It's overclocked to 3.5ghz. I have a decade old Raptor 10k, 130ish gig as my only 'fast' hard drive today. Everything else is 7200 or 5900 for media. My main reason to upgrade is I have a friend that is in desperate need of a quality system (my current one). He crashes everytime more than a dozen units start fighting in Starcraft 2 hah. I would very much like to donate my current system to this friend for his birthday which is about a month away.

Main questions:

  • #1 - Does anyone currently run raid0 with quality SSD's on their personal systems? If so, what are your thoughts on performance gains both synthetic and real world?
  • #2 - Assume I'll be using a 3770k processor. What Motherboard and SSD's would you go with? What Z77 motherboards have the best raid controllers to handle this? I don't want to get in a situation where RAID is slowing down my processor or vica versa.
  • #3 - If you don't think current motherboards have adequate raid controllers, then what physical raid controller would you go with? I'm assuming pci-express 2.0 here would be required for 6.0GB/s SSD's?
If anyone is knowledgeable enough regarding RAID 5 feel free to answer the above questions with RAID 5 in mind.

Thanks in advance everyone. I've been reading info on this forum for a decade and your expertise has been invaluable to me over the years.
 
uniqueaccount said:
[*]#1 - Does anyone currently run raid0 with quality SSD's on their personal systems? If so, what are your thoughts on performance gains both synthetic and real world?

[
Click to expand...

As for boot system drives, while you will see significant benchmark increases by RAID0'ng your SSD's, it offers you a serious case of diminishing returns in real life value. With Vertex 3's for example, I saw a decrease of 2 additional seconds on a cold boot, and an also imperceptible difference in general use. In my opinion, you will not see anywhere near the kind of speed boosts that you did with RAID0 HDD's. The only other benefit would be the ability to have a larger "C" drive and not have to worry about multiple drive letters, but that benefit can be negated by using NTFS symbolic links. The lack currently of TRIM support in RAID for Intel will probably be resolved in the next release or two of the drivers, but that is still currently another deficit. All told, it isn't worth the extra point of failure this created for any benefit you would gain in real life. No, if you are creating volumes specifically for Database (SQL specifically) needs, you will see a benefit with multi-drive RAID0 (Would suggest RAID10 for the additional uptime the mirror offers) (with proper backups in place of course) but for a boot drive stick with single drives.
 
Last edited:
uniqueaccount said:
While I appreciate your reply, do you have any numbers or experiences to back that statement up?
Click to expand...

I ran SSD's in RAID 0 for a year or so on my X58 system. It was more of a novelty than anything. A single quality SSD is a lot simpler and from my everyday experience, I wouldn't run them in RAID again, especially for long term use. Converting back to a single SSD saw no perceptible performance loss

Now for a more commercial purpose that put money in my pocket, I would consider it again.
 
Running SSDs in RAID prevents TRIM from working. This can cause a performance drop of up to 50% in the long run which negates the performance increase from RAID completely.

Also if you are just running small (<=64GB) SSD's in RAID 0 to save money, you're probably performing no better than the single drive equivalent, as most smaller SSD's now use less flash channels, which means less throughput. For sample the 64GB version of Crucial M4 performs about half as well as the 128GB version.

Source: I ran 2 64GB SSDs and 2 160GB SSDs in RAID 0
 
mwroobel said:
As for boot system drives, while you will see significant benchmark increases by RAID0'ng your SSD's, it offers you a serious case of diminishing returns in real life value. With Vertex 3's for example, I saw a decrease of 2 additional seconds on a cold boot, and an also imperceptible difference in general use. In my opinion, you will not see anywhere near the kind of speed boosts that you did with RAID0 HDD's. The only other benefit would be the ability to have a larger "C" drive and not have to worry about multiple drive letters, but that benefit can be negated by using NTFS symbolic links. The lack currently of TRIM support in RAID for Intel will probably be resolved in the next release or two of the drivers, but that is still currently another deficit. All told, it isn't worth the extra point of failure this created for any benefit you would gain in real life. No, if you are creating volumes specifically for Database (SQL specifically) needs, you will see a benefit with multi-drive RAID0 (Would suggest RAID10 for the additional uptime the mirror offers) (with proper backups in place of course) but for a boot drive stick with single drives.
Click to expand...

I don't need to run SQL databases at home, just at work thankfully :)

What are your thoughts on using a single SSD as a boot drive / C:\, and having two SSD's raid0'd for apps/games?
 
Xeth said:
Running SSDs in RAID prevents TRIM from working. This can cause a performance drop of up to 50% in the long run which negates the performance increase from RAID completely.

Also if you are just running small (<=64GB) SSD's in RAID 0 to save money, you're probably performing no better than the single drive equivalent, as most smaller SSD's now use less flash channels, which means less throughput. For sample the 64GB version of Crucial M4 performs about half as well as the 128GB version.

Source: I ran 2 64GB SSDs and 2 160GB SSDs in RAID 0
Click to expand...

I would do this with drives in the 120-180 range, not 60ish range.

If and when intel supports SSD+RAID+TRIM would that be as simple as updating a driver, or needing to rebuild a raid array?

To the other responders that brought up reliability - I'm not too worried about it. I understand 1 drive failing makes me lose my data on all drives in the array. However, this is the age of the cloud. All of my important documents are in my free dropbox account which is chilling at about 13gigs, and some of the larger personal things are in my 50gig box.net account. In addition to all of that, I have a Windows Home Server that backs up all of my home systems daily. I would have the option to restore from a WHS backup as a worst case scenario. The WHS is in RAID1 (kinda, technically it's just mirroring all the folders).
 
uniqueaccount said:
I don't need to run SQL databases at home, just at work thankfully :)

What are your thoughts on using a single SSD as a boot drive / C:\, and having two SSD's raid0'd for apps/games?
Click to expand...

Personally, I wouldn't bother. If you haven't bought the drives yet, buy a bigger single instead of two smaller ones. If you have them already you can do as you wish, but I don't think the RAID buys you any real-life benefit.
 
I have 2 64GB C300's in R0 partitioned to 100GB. I haven't run any speed tests on them, but I dont notice BF3 loading faster than it did when on a single C300. I did it only because I had 2 64GB drives and needed more than 64GB of space. The R0 is also not my boot drive, using 6Gbit SATA and windows R0. I had tested windows R0 with 4x 450GB VR and it was faster, though not by much, than using the Intel Raid.

I saw a bigger improvement, no numbers just daily usage, with chrome by putting the cache in a RAM drive than switching from a WD Green to SSD.

If buying new, just get a 256GB. Unless you are doing something that can saturate 500MB/s like video editing or transferring files back and forth between SSD R0s, SSD R0 is all epeen.
 
cactus said:
I have 2 64GB C300's in R0 partitioned to 100GB. I haven't run any speed tests on them, but I dont notice BF3 loading faster than it did when on a single C300. I did it only because I had 2 64GB drives and needed more than 64GB of space. The R0 is also not my boot drive, using 6Gbit SATA and windows R0. I had tested windows R0 with 4x 450GB VR and it was faster, though not by much, than using the Intel Raid.

I saw a bigger improvement, no numbers just daily usage, with chrome by putting the cache in a RAM drive than switching from a WD Green to SSD.

If buying new, just get a 256GB. Unless you are doing something that can saturate 500MB/s like video editing or transferring files back and forth between SSD R0s, SSD R0 is all epeen.
Click to expand...

I'll be upgrading from a raptor 10k, so i'll see a speed boost no matter what I do with a SSD ;) Also I will be buying new. I realize a lot of this is just brand fanboyism, synthetic tests, 'my friend had one fail' evidence, but personally I'm looking at the Corsair Force GT 120's or the crucial M4's. Any other drive I should be looking for deals on or any reason why I shouldn't consider the Corsair or Crucial offerings?
 
I run three 256GB Crucial C300s on an LSI 9260.

Like engine HP, audio, video, and whatever else you can think of, the last 10% of performance will cost 90% more.

Only YOU can determine if it's "worth it" or not. ;)
 
I am personally running two 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 drives in RAID-0.

Backstory: About 6 months ago I upgraded from using two 250GB sATA2 platter drives in RAID-0. The performance on the drives wasn't bad at the time. My system would boot to desktop in about 35-45 seconds (not including POST screen). I considered this good. One thing I was frustrated with was the noise of the drives and the heat they were generating. I have the Antec 1200 case. The drives sit at the front, and the front fans pull air in over the drives than into my case. Through testing the air coming into the case was between 21°C and 23°C on average. After several hours of my computer being on, and in use, the air exiting the drive bays into the rest of the chassis was averaging 26°C. I had been keeping my eye on SSD's for quite a while, and when the price dropped low enough I would jump on a pair. 6 Months ago that happened at my local computer store, NCIX. They had a sale on 120GB OCZ Vertex 3's. So I grabbed 2.​

So I did what I did always. I slapped them in my system, set them up in RAID-0, and then installed Windows. I was not blown away by the performance. Boot times only dropped by about 5 seconds. Applications loaded quicker, but not as fast as some have claimed. And through benchmarking my system was not performing as quick as a lot of the results I see online for these drives. I updated the firmware on the drives, and in the process found what I consider the holy grail of SSD setup and maintenance.

A guide that walks you through proper installation of SSD's, from BIOS settings, to preparing the drives for the OS, to Windows 7 configuration and tweaks. It sounds like a lot of work, but in reality it's only about another 10 to 15 minutes on top of what I normally did. After completing the guide I use the system as I always have. There is no "regular maintenance" or anything. It's extremely fast, and stays that way, even after leaving my system on for a week or more without a reboot it still works just as fast as when it first booted up.

I'm going to share a video I made. This is my actual system that is detailed in my signature. This was just after me updating the firmware on the drives to 2.15 and re-installing Windows 7 and following that guide. Shows my system booting to the desktop in 6 seconds from a cold boot (not counting POST screen). All drivers loaded and all Windows 7 updates installed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-pMsA4ahk4&hd=1

I haven't tried these drives in a non RAID setup, so I can't speak for their performance outside of what I am using. But a lot of people here are saying it's not worth running them in RAID-0 because the performance gains aren't there or worth it, or that you'll lose TRIM support, etc. A lot of the SSD's these days have "Garbage Collection" built into their firmware, and Intel is adding support for TRIM on RAID-0 drives very shortly.

Just speaking from my personal experience, I am thoroughly enjoying my SSD's in RAID-0. I keep my OS and any games I'm playing on them. Everything loads extremely quick.

Here's a link to that guide I mentioned:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

So to quickly answer your questions.

1) I run two SSD's in RAID-0 and I am extremely happy with the performance of them. No way on earth could a platter drive match them.
2) I have the Asus Sabertooth P67 motherboard. It's been an awesome board, and from what I hear, the new Sabertooth Z77 is even better.
3) The on board RAID controller on my P67 Sabertooth is decent. I don't have any other RAID controllers to compare it to, so I can't speak for quality or speeds, but it does the trick. Easy to setup RAID volumes, and as mentioned. Intel RST RAID TRIM support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 should be coming out with RST 11.0 very shortly.
 
Last edited:
Thank you for your for your input and taking the time to respond to this thread. Your knowledge is greatly appreciated.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top