Setting up SSD raid setup - verify my checklist

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Suicidal Insanity

Limp Gawd
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Jan 6, 2003
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I should be receiving my new SSDs this weekend if everything goes according to plan, I wanted to make sure I install everything correctly. (2 80gb intels in raid 0).

When partitioning should I use quick format, to ensure the disk does not think it is completely in use? Do I need to make sure that no cells are bad when the disk is new?

Then, do I need to take special care to align the raid stripes with the flash cell block size? Or is this usually done automatically? Same thing with the partition offsets, do these need to be changed because it is a raid drive? (Using win7).
 
Set up the RAID in the BIOS then boot your Win7 install DVD and let it do the rest.

If you're not using Win7, then you'll run into more issues in setting it up properly.

Remember that if one of those drives has a hiccup you risk losing all the data on the RAID.
 
Check the firmware and update if necessary before you build your RAID array.
 
^^^^^^
Thanks, probably would have forgotten that.


I'm running win7, I will most likely just do a clean install onto the raid to get the partitions correct, boot into a live cd or something and copy my current C drive over to the raid, to save reinstalling all my apps. I've done this before it just involves some nasty registry hacking for the drive letters and stuff.

I currently backup my important data weekly onto a raid-1 array located in another room, and occasionally (~monthly) place dvds with code/photos/etc into a secure location on the other side of town, that is covered. Although I am a bit annoyed that the 40gig kingston drives with free acronis havn't been in stock here for weeks, that works much nicer than what I use.
 
If you aren't doing a clean install, you may need to manually check on all the things that Win7 normally does when it's clean installed to an SSD. This can include changing the setttings for......

• Windows Indexing Service
• System Restore
• Windows Defrag
• Windows Prefetcher
• Windows Vista Superfetch

Windows 7 will normally set things properly on a clean install, but may not if you copy over the old files (make sure you don't do a drive copy or it may mess with the alignment of the SSD), and things like indexing can waste a lot of read/write cycles on the drive. You also don't ever want to run defragging.

Might wanna skim this to get an idea of some things to check the settings on.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx
 
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