Intel X25-M Mainstream 80GB RAID 0

[Craig321]

Well, my hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in my system. I currently have 2x 250GB WD drives in RAID 0 which give pretty good performance, but nothing compared to a solid state's read/write & especially access times.

Does anyone have 2x X25-M Mainstreams in RAID 0? If so, what performance are you seeing?

Is it worth going RAID 0 on these (I'm not bothered about reliability, I store nothing on them apart from OS), I've read enabling TRIM gives similar performance to RAID 0?

Craig.

 

[jbloggs]

I have 2 x 80GB Intel X25-M G2s in RAID0, I'm using this because I work with a lot of large (video) files (copying/moving) etc, so see a decent performance gain as opposed to using a single SSD.

Really only 2 situations that I know off that SSDs in RAID0 are worthwhile and that is working with large files (copying/moving) and/or unzipping larges files regularly, if you don't do both or either of these two things I would be inclind just to get the 160GB Intel X25-M G2.

With 2 SSDs in RAID0, TRIM does not run either automatically or manually via Intel SSD Toolbox, and won't do so until Intel releases a drivers update for the Intel ICHxR controller, whereas with a single 160GB it will run automatically if you have the Microsoft drivers installed (using AHCI), or if using the Intel drivers, you can run it manually via the Toolbox.

You will see some form of performance degradation (really in writes) when using RAID0 after a period of time due to no TRIM running.