SSD RAID scaling under Windows 7 @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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SSD RAID scaling under Windows 7 - What can you expect when you get your new Windows 7 install working with those crisp new solid state hard drives? SSD drives are not what they used to be already. And just how is that Intel ICH10R chipset serving you?

One final chart before we go. What will running all these drives in RAID-0 get you in terms of boot up speed? Do we finally have an instant-on PC?
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Been using a single 60GB OCZ Vertex with XP on a X38 chipset DFI board for the last few months. Even with the older technology, there's no way in hell I would go back to using a standard hard drive as my OS drive.
 
I gotta get more sleep, it took me a closer look to realize the bootup chart was in seconds. But was the time started from when turning on the computer thus also taking the time for the controller's to load up the array or was the time taken when the Windows 7 loading screen came up?

I would of liked to see how game loading performance also...but you had 4 drives when these people had like 26 link.

One thing also about ssd's that I like is the weight saved...4x 3.5" hdd weigh a whole lot more than 4x ssd's.
 
Based on my experience with my SSD it seems like device initialization now takes up a large percentage of time, as opposed to waiting on the disk most of the time.
 
Once you go SSD you never go back. The upsides far far far outweigh the downsides and there aren't that many downsides because they can only get better because they aren't mechanically based anymore.
 
Interesting results. Very different from what I would have thought. So what I'm hearing is after I win the uber lotto (1Billion+ USD), I should run a single SSD for my OS and I really only need a 3x raid for programs.
 
While the upsides are getting better, I think I'd still much rather wait a few years for SSDs to mature and go for larger capacities on HDDs. There are simply too many variables in buying them for me still (price, performance scaling poorly with space used, overall capacity, etc).

I'd love to have an instant on PC, but waiting an extra 15 seconds for windows to load to avoid having to delete/reinstall games every week is time I'm willing to spend.
 
I have plans on making the leap to SSD around early next year, so this article was really informative for me. I was still torn as to if I should go with a single internal ssd and convert my current raid to an external storage or if I should go all out will a full on internal SSD Raid. From the looks of things given how infrequent I need to access what would be on the external storage, it looks like I can save the extra and opt for a single internal.
 
_Great_ review, guys! I hear ya Dekoth, we're in the same boat ;) and this article was very, very informative (very n00b friendly even for a guy like me). That's why I LOVE this page! :D

kuyaglen said:
But was the time started from when turning on the computer thus also taking the time for the controller's to load up the array or was the time taken when the Windows 7 loading screen came up?
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Yep, Kyle said it measured the time from the moment W7 is starting up, to remove the BIOS overhead.
 
BrndNtrl said:
While the upsides are getting better, I think I'd still much rather wait a few years for SSDs to mature and go for larger capacities on HDDs. There are simply too many variables in buying them for me still (price, performance scaling poorly with space used, overall capacity, etc).

I'd love to have an instant on PC, but waiting an extra 15 seconds for windows to load to avoid having to delete/reinstall games every week is time I'm willing to spend.
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I'm with you on that. I try not to be an early adopter of technology because I end up getting bit in the ass for it. So I'm going to wait until things get sorted out. That, and I have a lot of data to store between games, music, and movie rips, and I'd rather buy a single terabyte hard drive rather than shell out the cash for a terabyte worth of SSD's. I need the capacity more than I need raw speed.

Maybe once the technology matures more and there's decent capacities (500+) at decent prices, I'll hop onto SSD for a strictly gaming rig.
 
The increased overhead of RAID also makes it a slightly slower option when compared to a single drive in our case.
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Huh? What does that mean, specifically?
 
I'd be curious to see what the same tests would yield using a pair of SLC based SSDs. Particularly with the write speeds.
 
mikeblas said:
Huh? What does that mean, specifically?
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Basically, raid 0 splits up the data into 128kb chunks and sends it out 128kb at a time to the different drives, while this may help throughput, it can also hurt seek time. specially with SSDs which have virtually 0 seek time, now you're introducing the time it takes the controller to do the work too.

I could be wrong :p
 
Editing the introduction for grammar and flow. I'm sorry if the edits look messy, but I can't figure out how to do strikethrough on this forum.

Most of the time when we start a new article here at the [H]{missing comma} it goes pretty much as planned{missing comma} with the new hardware beating the old stuff by some margin. Sometimes articles take on a whole new shape as{replace "as" with "when"} your results don’t line up with expectations. Even{replace ". Even" with ", and"} the technology being tested can improve in the short time between the start of an article and its publication. Working with cutting edge technology{missing comma} it is always a little tricky knowing if{replace "if" with "whether"} the results you’re seeing are valid or {insert "if they are"} some aberration from drivers or hardware incompatibility. SSDs are the prime example. Anyone looking to purchase an SSD should know that the technology behind these drives is progressing at such a fast pace that what was a{remove "a"} practical knowledge yesterday is out of day by{replace "out of day by" with "obselete information"} tomorrow.

In case you don’t know where I am going with this{missing comma} let me be frank. When this article was conceived{missing comma} it was to be an informative article for both newcomers and enthusiasts to the world of SSDs. What{replace "What" with "We wanted to explain what"} steps were needed to properly set up your new SSD{missing comma} as well as how to get the very most{replace "most" with "best"} performance from your drive. As mentioned before, the technology behind SSD has progressed so quickly that much of the information out on the web is on the verge of being obsolete, save for some older SSDs.

For today's article{missing comma} we are going to show you guys what a lot of{replace "guys what a lot of" with "what"} you can expect when you jump on the Windows 7 bandwagon and slap together some RAID-0 SSD awesomeness with a sprinkle of the Intel ICH10R Southbridge aka {insert "the"} x58 chipset. Just for good measure{missing comma} we are going to toss in some {insert "performance"} charts when running a dedicated RAID card to see what, if any,{replace ", if any," with "kind of performance"} boost can be expected from such a setup.
 
if the SSD is an 200MB/s device (and is not JMicron) under nomr use not lieky to see the improvement of SSD in raid, unless you got 4 SSDs with 2 RAID 0 setups so you can watch 4gb files transfer at 300-400MB/s or you run benchmarks get big numbers but not real world

i got an Corsair S128 considering the Read and Write is 90MB/s / 70MB/s every thing responds fast even games, now the P128 is out (seems to of replaced the S128 now as not in stock any more) but under norm use my games mite load 1-3 secs faster then my SSD

if you going with SSD get an second gen SSD and get the size you need as when windows 7 comes out there be an update that give TRIM support for windows 7 and that should keep the drive at peek performance (Trim may not work on RAID)
 
while I like the article, it still feels a bit meaningless when none of this is entry level or even affordable for the average consumer, maybe thats just me but 4X $300 drives and a $400 raid card to keep it comparable..... wait I forget gotta shell out to keep up with the times
 
I agree about the meaningless comment -- it should include spinning storage as a baseline for comparison.
 
"In our brief overview of RAID scaling under Windows 7 we showed you the limit that the popular ICH10R Southbridge places and yours PC's drive throughput."

Should be "places ON your PC's drive throughput." I hate to be that guy, but I had to read this sentence three times before I understood it.
 
aggiec05 said:
while I like the article, it still feels a bit meaningless when none of this is entry level or even affordable for the average consumer, maybe thats just me but 4X $300 drives and a $400 raid card to keep it comparable..... wait I forget gotta shell out to keep up with the times
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Agreed...total cost for faster boot/seeks times is ridiculous at this stage of the game. You can purchase a complete high end gaming machine with monitor OR pay for a 4x SSD hard drive raid setup w/raid card for the same price. Seems like a no brainer to me. SSD's will mature, get better and get cheaper so no harm in waiting for a while...
 
I would love to see this test again using a top ARECA controller.

For example the ARC-1680ix-08, i know its not a cheap card +/- $500, but i upgraded my server at home to a ARC-1680ix-16 from a SuperTrak EX16300

I minimal tripled my true put on big files it was even up to 5x times.

I know $500 isn't in the budget range of most users still it would be interesting to see if a top controller can really make the different and see if its worth the money on these extreme fast SSDs
 
vick1000 said:
The only problem is severe degradation of performance with use and volume of NAND based SSDs...
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The new SSDs based am the new samsung controller don't have this problem any more ore at least a lot less
 
Would an SSD allow me to scroll through The [H]ard|OCP home page without a 10 second delay while my computor digests all the fancy ads? ;)
 
There are a few other things to take into account.

Highpoint is entry level to be sure, they are using the latest IOP from Intel but only running it at 800Mhz does gimp it some.

I though your price on the 4310 was high, I found it on eWiz for like 300.00, but hey what is a hundred bucks when you have already bought 4 SSD's.

I agree Arcea is a better card all the way around even on the previous gen models, but you get what you pay for.

If you are running a RAID 5 array the on board is going to get pounded by the hardware card. Since you are doing RAID 0 there is no calculation overhead for parody.

Also block size you formatted the file system in has a large impact on performance. Most SSD's read well at one block size and write well at another. 32KB to 64KB for reads and 2KB to 4KB for writes is a good point on most that I've worked with.I may may have missed it but I didn't see what block size you had on the file system and if it was sector aligned at all.

-wes
 
Interesting. I'd love to see what happens when you try to run a raid 5 or 10 using the drives.

Also any spikes in cpu utilization using the onboard controller?
 
Am I foolish to believe that for a machine that's just used for Internet and gaming, Raid really doesn't provide any performance increases as long as you have a newer, fast, single magnetic drive?
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Basically, raid 0 splits up the data into 128kb chunks and sends it out 128kb at a time to the different drives, while this may help throughput, it can also hurt seek time. specially with SSDs which have virtually 0 seek time, now you're introducing the time it takes the controller to do the work too.
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The overhead only appears if the request size is smaller than the stripe size, then. And the overhead you're describing would seem negligible anyway; the controller just does a little work, and sends the commands along. They execute concurrently.

Digital Viper-X- said:
I could be wrong :p
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Or you could be right. There's lots of room for guessing when trying to make sense of such a vague statement.
 
Seriously, who's going to run 4 drives in RAID 0? Unless, of course, you like a really low MTBF. I don't know how SSD drives compare with rotating rust on reliability, but I'd never chance it on hard disks.

I'd also question calling the Highpoint 4xxx series entry level raid cards. Maybe for an enterpise system, but for home use, I'd consider the 2xxx series entry level. Especially with only RAID 0, where you don't have to calculate parity, the dedicated IOP on the 4xxx series doesn't do you a lot of good.

Unlike your average integrated RAID, most dedicated RAID cards will support online capacity expansion, allowing you to add a drive to the array and have the array still be usable with the OS running while the card reconfigures the drives (which can take a while). The can also handle hot spares, email & audible alerts if a drive fails, but I suppose that doesn't matter if you're running RAID 0, you'll find out when nothing works.

While it may not be true for Intel chipsets, I've always found the drivers for NVIDIA SATA RAID to be really flakey, if you could get them to work at all. I've never had driver issues with dedicated disc controllers (both RAID & other).

I have two systems with Highpoint 2xxx series cards (a 2320 & 2310) and couldn't be happier. I bought them solely for online capacity expansion and to avoid driver issues. I'd never use an integrated RAID controller for anything other than RAID 0 or 1 on a pair of drives.
 
This article couldn't have come at a better time for me. I recently purchased a 128GB Patriot Warp SSD. I'm thouroughly amazed at the performance difference between my WD 250AAKS and this drive. I had the option of grabbing a 64GB SSD, but with the advent of "large footprint" OSs (Vista: 15GB, 7: 20GB), I thought it would be best to invest in the larger size. Like I mentioned, the performance increase is noticeable.

To load a TF2 map take seconds compared to a full minute with my WD AAKS drive. Other games show massive level load time decreases as well.

To make my post relevant, I was considering purchasing a second 128GB Warp and running them in RAID0. Yes, I see the sequential transfers increase proportionally with each additional SSD added, but the increase in OS boot time shows me the random read performance has something to be desired. Adding more SSDs would only benefit a company running a large database, and not the average user.
 
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It would be interesting to see those boot time benches re-done at a really small stripe size, like 4KB.
 
Since this was an SSD/RAID preview for Windows 7, I'm sorta wondering why there weren't benchmarks done comparing it to Vista. I'm curious as to how much faster Windows 7 would be in respect to SSDs.

BTW, I haven't been keeping track of these things as much as I used to, but has Microsoft made optimizations specifically for SSDs in Windows 7?

Otherwise, it was a great review and interesting read! :D
 
Thanks for the review, [H].

It's going to be a while before I purchase any SSDs. I'm holding out until the product matures more before jumping on the bandwagon. That means I'll have to continue wearing this bib to catch the drool everytime I see benchmarks performed. :p
 
Earp said:
Seriously, who's going to run 4 drives in RAID 0? Unless, of course, you like a really low MTBF. I don't know how SSD drives compare with rotating rust on reliability, but I'd never chance it on hard disks.
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Why not? Don't you take backups?
 
Seriously, who's going to run 4 drives in RAID 0? Unless, of course, you like a really low MTBF. I don't know how SSD drives compare with rotating rust on reliability, but I'd never chance it on hard disks.
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I think it largely depends on what you store. I don't have really anything on my disk that would cause drastic harm if I lost.
 
Earp said:
Seriously, who's going to run 4 drives in RAID 0? Unless, of course, you like a really low MTBF. I don't know how SSD drives compare with rotating rust on reliability, but I'd never chance it on hard disks.
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I would also not run it in R0 but think lots of people would consider it for 2 drives
I'd also question calling the Highpoint 4xxx series entry level raid cards. Maybe for an enterpise system, but for home use, I'd consider the 2xxx series entry level. Especially with only RAID 0, where you don't have to calculate parity, the dedicated IOP on the 4xxx series doesn't do you a lot of good.
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Performance wise i would consider all products from Promice and HighPoint entry level
Unlike your average integrated RAID, most dedicated RAID cards will support online capacity expansion, allowing you to add a drive to the array and have the array still be usable with the OS running while the card reconfigures the drives (which can take a while). The can also handle hot spares, email & audible alerts if a drive fails, but I suppose that doesn't matter if you're running RAID 0, you'll find out when nothing works.
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I don't a lot of people would disagrea on that whit you i would also use R5 ore R10 if i would use more then 2 drives, whit more drives you ad, you increase failure rate expectational
While it may not be true for Intel chipsets, I've always found the drivers for NVIDIA SATA RAID to be really flakey, if you could get them to work at all. I've never had driver issues with dedicated disc controllers (both RAID & other).
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The intel chipset raid options are 10x better the nVidia's still they lag miles behind compered to Adatec and ARECA controllers, at a price ;)
I have two systems with Highpoint 2xxx series cards (a 2320 & 2310) and couldn't be happier. I bought them solely for online capacity expansion and to avoid driver issues. I'd never use an integrated RAID controller for anything other than RAID 0 or 1 on a pair of drives.
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Noting wrong whit those controllers, they just a little slower then Areca en Adaptec but like i sayed preformance comes at a price a high one
 
This discussion is serously outdated. Welcome to 5 months ago.
Keep in mind these topics and more have been covered at length on the OCZ SSD forums, with far more accuracy. You should stop by there if you really want an education on the cutting edge.
Also, boot times vary completely per brand, model and even size of SSD, so take all of those benches with a grain of salt. This has been verified on the forums, and I have timed it myself, using multibranded R0 setups.
Another thing, while a high-dollar controller is hugely beneficial on a traditional disk RAID0 setup, the benefits are far less with SSD. The ICH10R has proven to be "the" sweetspot for most consumer SSD setups. nV's onboard offerings are still a joke in comparison.
I'm waiting for the '11R.
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