What would you do with 4 Crucial M4 128G SSD drives?

S

sorrow

n00b
Joined
Aug 12, 2005
Messages
21
So I am about to get 4 of these drives. I was at first thinking I would put all of them in raid 0 and use them as my game storage area; then I realized my mobo cannot handle 4 drives all on the same controller. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128583 Unless i'm reading it wrong it is two separate controllers and that could allow me to do software raid but that may not be the best.

Now I am thinking I will just create 2 raid 0 setups and use those. I don't mind if data is lost because it is all for my games. I have another ssd for the OS and another 500gb drive for etc.

what would you guys do?
 
You have 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0/1) and 4 x SATA 3Gb/s (SATA2 2~5) Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 on one controller (Intel) and 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3 6/7) Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1 (Probably Jmicron).

As long as you have them on the intel controller you can raid them together, just 2 drives will not get the 6Gb/s connection.

I would raid them (4 M4's) on the intel controller. Put the os drive on that controller also and the 500GB drive on whichever controller you want.

That's just my input.
 
For games, I'd just span all 4 drives into one large volume. I'd be more inclined to do a JBOD rather than a RAID 0 in that case, for the benefit of those games that do like to do small random writes. Software RAID is totally fine, since that's what Intel RST is and RAID 0 is quite minor on CPU. Try to avoid that second non-chipset controller for the SSDs if it's easily doable, as it's more than likely PCIe 1x for the two ports.
 
But why not get a single larger drive? Or 2 larger ones?

Your best bet would probably be 2x256GB
 
JackNSally said:
You have 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (SATA3 0/1) and 4 x SATA 3Gb/s (SATA2 2~5) Support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 on one controller (Intel) and 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3 6/7) Support for RAID 0 and RAID 1 (Probably Jmicron).

As long as you have them on the intel controller you can raid them together, just 2 drives will not get the 6Gb/s connection.

I would raid them (4 M4's) on the intel controller. Put the os drive on that controller also and the 500GB drive on whichever controller you want.

That's just my input.
Click to expand...

What do you mean "just 2 drives will not get the 6G/s?" You think putting the 4 drives on the sata 3Gb would be ok?

As for the other comments:

The drives are hand me down so I don't have the option to get 256's instead.

I'd thought about concatenating them but why when I can raid 0 and still get the same storage but faster.
 
There is no benefit with RAID0 in desktop, just risks. I would use them as 4 separate disks.
 
That board is Z77 so it's probably similar to my server board with all the plugs being intel, just two happen to be SATA3.

I'd keep the OS SSD on the SATA3 and then do whatever you like with the others. IIRC the major advantages of raided SSDs are only apparent at high queue depths which are pretty rare in games.
 
Honestly, they're right. You're better off with JBOD concatenation or separate disks. You aren't seeing queue depths large enough to worry about RAID.
 
Machupo said:
Quad mSATA PCIe RAID?
Click to expand...

I wonder if there is a 10 year old SATA II controller used in this device giving it horrendous latency?

Edit: By looking at the inf file for the driver (mv91cons.inf) that is listed in the pdf documentation the controller is a "Marvell91xx SATA 6G Controller" so not as bad as I thought but still not recommended for ssd raid performance.
 
Last edited:
sorrow said:
What do you mean "just 2 drives will not get the 6G/s?" You think putting the 4 drives on the sata 3Gb would be ok?

As for the other comments:

The drives are hand me down so I don't have the option to get 256's instead.

I'd thought about concatenating them but why when I can raid 0 and still get the same storage but faster.
Click to expand...

The 4 drives on the Intel SATA 2 ports will probably actually be better overall. The addon Marvell SATA 3 ports likely shares a PCIe 2.0 x1 lane to the chipset, so you'll get 5.0 Gbps total between the two ports.

RAID 0 with SSDs isn't always faster than a single drive. The idea being that with small random reads/writes, all you have to do is read/write those blocks from a single drive rather than reading/writing a larger RAID 0 stripe. If your I/O is consistently the size of the stripe or larger, then you'll obviously benefit.

Put another way, I think you'll find a more noticable performance difference with JBOD for games that do small random IO (MMOs, etc) vs the increased sequential performance gained by RAID 0 for more linear games. But if you want to go RAID 0 I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal for the former.

With all that said, you have 4 hand me down SSDs that are still decent performers. Don't fuss too much over it.
 
Run individual disks. Should one drive die, it won't take the rest of your data with it, unlike RAID 0.

Especially with Steam allowing you to choose where to install games when you install them now, there's really no reason not to run individual disks for gaming SSDs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top