OCZ Vertex 2e best config

Tainted

Tainted

Tainted

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Hi guys,

I've got two drives arriving tomorrow, 2 x 60GB Vertex 2e from OcUK. They going into my 4ghz I7 Gigabyte UD5 motherboard. I plan to put them on the Intel controller and raid0 them.

Is there any advice any can give me so I can configure this up the best way possible. These are my first SSD drives so it's all new to me. Unless there is nothing to worry about and it's the same as a SATA disk?

Was reading about some setting being enabled TMC and G something? Not sure now?

Oh and does everyone always install the chipset/raid drivers on Windows 7 installs or just leave the default?

Thanks in advance, hope you all well.
 
Nothing special - I would use the intel chipset driver though instead of std windows one... but i would do that with all drives...
 
Standard drivers won't be any use for Raid I'd imagine, the windows standard AHCI driver is fairly good(AMD chipset the AMD driver is better, Intel, the windows driver CAN be better).

Trim will almost certainly not work on them and Raid essentially enables AHCI features. THe chipset can run in 3 different modes, IDE(sucks balls) Raid which enables most features and any drives not in raid mode will run as AHCI drives anyway, or AHCI which lets the drives use all the features they have and massively improves performance over IDE. You'll be using Raid, which is best of both worlds, download the latest raid driver of Intel's site(or mobo makers site maybe, Intels site is a damned mess), stick the drivers(will only be a few very small files) on a usb stick and when you install Windows and it asks what drive to use tell it to find driver and point it to the usb stick. Then install windows on your raided drive.

I'd avoid heavily benchmarking the drive though as the Vertex 2 type drives aren't holding their performance too well at the moment it seems. 2 in raid 0 will be blistering anyway.

Once you're in windows, install the Intel matrix storage driver, or whatever its called these days, then use that once installed(and probably a reboot) to enable NCQ and check all the performance features are on. Benchmark, drool, and install a game with lots of loading on it to see how fast the drives are.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Standard drivers won't be any use for Raid I'd imagine, the windows standard AHCI driver is fairly good(AMD chipset the AMD driver is better, Intel, the windows driver CAN be better).

Trim will almost certainly not work on them and Raid essentially enables AHCI features. THe chipset can run in 3 different modes, IDE(sucks balls) Raid which enables most features and any drives not in raid mode will run as AHCI drives anyway, or AHCI which lets the drives use all the features they have and massively improves performance over IDE. You'll be using Raid, which is best of both worlds, download the latest raid driver of Intel's site(or mobo makers site maybe, Intels site is a damned mess), stick the drivers(will only be a few very small files) on a usb stick and when you install Windows and it asks what drive to use tell it to find driver and point it to the usb stick. Then install windows on your raided drive.

I'd avoid heavily benchmarking the drive though as the Vertex 2 type drives aren't holding their performance too well at the moment it seems. 2 in raid 0 will be blistering anyway.

Once you're in windows, install the Intel matrix storage driver, or whatever its called these days, then use that once installed(and probably a reboot) to enable NCQ and check all the performance features are on. Benchmark, drool, and install a game with lots of loading on it to see how fast the drives are.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that informative post drunkmaster, much appreciated! :)

So basically treat them same as normal raids and install latest drivers. It was that Trim I read about somewhere but was not raid complient or is done away with.

You mention the Vertex 2 drives are not holding their performance too well? Gutted!! They will be arriving in a few hours!! Got any links to what you mean by that or can briefly explain?
 
Have a look on OCZ's forums, lots of users posting benchmarks where after a week or two's usage(or lots of benchmarking) they aren't getting anything close in writes to what reviews are getting, certainly not bad, at all, just noticeably lower.

Its most likely just trim not working "that" well, or maybe at all, new drives, including the Intel, Indilinx and most other drives took a while to get trim working well, get the right driver, the right firmware and the right tweaking in firmware to get performance to stay the same.

The Intel drives released without Trim support, but have it now, same for Indilinx, when you see sustained performance in terms of performance after heavy usage, Indilinx drives suffered pretty badly but are now pretty superb, same for Intel, The sandforce drives seem to be dropping off at the moment. I've got C300 128gb at the moment, it seems to be holding its performance fairly well and user benchmarks seem to suggest the same, a drop off, but not very big.


But in all honesty, I've got two indilinx drives for sale, RMA replacements as my old mobo dying seemed to trash both drives :( I saw reviews and benchmarks and thought my indilinx's were so far behind I ended up with the new Crucial drive, it wipes the floor with my two indlinx's even in raid(2x64gb models) in benchmarks. In reality, it feels identical.

My drives actualy died about a week or so apart(i think the mobo dying damaged them, something happened them one just took a little longer to go). I had them in Raid 0 before, I was running as a single afterwards, I could barely tell the difference, and from a single indilinx to a (in benchmarks) much faster C300 I again can't really tell the difference.

I reall feel theres a base level of random read/write speed you need which basically gets rid of the bottleneck old drives had, stops all hanging when you try to do too many things at once and the instant access, beyond that point theres very little performance difference to feel in real world situations, while benchmarks can show massive differences.

This is , gaming, windows loading, general snappyness of windows, opening programs, basically a GOOD SSD is SO much faster than a mechanical drive in all the important bits, a great ssd is only a little better than the already way faster drives. The difference between a mechanical drive and a good ssd is obvious in everything you do on your computer, the difference between a good and great SSD, is barely noticeable.

My guess would be future firmwares and tweaked trim commands will get the sandforce drives back up to close to the numbers you see in reviews.
 
Oh ok, interesting. Sounds like the law of diminishing return here. Only so much will help and the rest is for becnhmark status.

Installing windows now, will report back my findings once I have gotten used to it.
 
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The Intel Rapid Storage drivers are recommended for Vertex 2/LE drives due to a bug with the Microsoft AHCI driver, there's a sticky about it on the OCZ forums.
 
TRIM doesn't work on RAID but presumably the Vertex 2 has Garbage Collection. Just log off for an hour a week should allow GC to keep the performance up.
 
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