Looking to go SSD - advice needed

Naan_H

Naan_H

Naan_H

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Hi all,

Looking to upgrade a few components and keep the noise in my pc down.

currently have,

q6600
P5Q Pro
8gb RAM
1TB Samsung F1 (windows)
2TB WD Green
Windows 7

Im looking to get an SSD for windows and general tasks. I have never had a RAID set up before, but am interested in doing this with 2x 60GB OCZ vertex 2E SSDs

Would i be wasting my time doing that on my current system, and would 1 SSD suffice? would i see much difference, apart from an extra 60GB space, of going with a RAID 0 set up? Am i right in thinking its harder to maintain a RAID 0 set up with SSDs?

Thanks in advance
 
The Vertex 2E's garbage collect to recover performance whilst idle. This is why OCZ feels confident using them in the Revodrive and IBIS.

Considering the pricing per GB of SSD's you may as well go RAID. You won't notice the extra performance a lot of the time, but since it's almost free It'd be silly not to have it.
 
Does garbage collecting have anything to do with TRIM support? Reading the sticky it says TRIM is not enabled in Raid 0, is this a concern?
 
I have purchased 2 of these for my system and am going to raid 0 them - can someone advise me how to do this with my mobo? i understand i cant use AHCI in this mode , but trim will work fine in win 7? Does anybody know any useful guides and drivers to get?

thanks in advance
 
You will not get TRIM with RAID 0. You'll have to rely on garbage collection instead, which means leaving your PC logged out for a few hours a week. You'll essentially be using AHCI because it's a subset of RAID (i.e. all of the features minus the drive arrays).

Use the Intel RST drivers if your motherboard supports it, otherwise use the Windows-applied MS drivers.
 
When you say logged out, do you mean turned off? or is there special software i need for that? My computer spends a lot of time off!

according to the SSD sticky, it says

'SandForce-based controllers offer native TRIM support in Windows 7. For TRIM to work in Raid you will need Intel's ICH-10 SATA controller, which allows pass-through TRIM functionality, you will also need Intel's latest Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) software. If you don't have an ICH-10 Intel Chipset motherboard you can't have TRIM in raid0.'

Im pretty sure the P45 chipset has intel ICH-10 - will it support TRIM then with the latest drivers, or is the sticky wrong?
 
When I said "logged out", I meant logged out, not turned off.

Regarding TRIM, I'm pretty sure the sticky is wrong. My understanding is that TRIM can be passed through when your controller is in RAID mode but not when the drives themselves are in a RAID array. So, if you have your SSD plugged into a SATA controller that is in RAID mode because you have a RAID 5 HDD array, then you still get TRIM.
 
Ok, so i take it the drivers or the ssd know when the computer is logged out to 'garbage collect' - if i dont do this then the SSDs will become slower? How will i know if im 'logging out' for long enough. seems a bit mundane that this needs to be done!
 
I think the PC just has to be idle but logging out basically ensures nothing will prevent the PC being idle. I asked OCZ how much time it would need for an average user and they said it should be fine to set the PC to sleep after 1 hour of idle. That way you don't have to leave your PC all the time to ensure GC happens - just logout instead of turning it off when going out or overnight and it'll perform GC then sleep without wasting too much energy. Once a week at most, I'd say.

I agree it is mundane but it only really has to be done when using the drives in RAID, so it's up to you whether you want the benefits and drawbacks of that.
 
I have purchased these and happy to do it - just want to get it right :) its my first ever RAID setup, and i know its going to be blisteringly fast considering what im coming from, and with my trusty q6600 should still last me for a few years to come.

Just out of interest are you running these in RAID 0? i cant see any SSDs in your sig :)
 
Just curious, after installing Win 7 HP, Win updates, browsers, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Office, Itunes, Spotify, VLC etc how much space would be left on a 120Gb drive like this? Or easier....how much space do you have left with a formatted drive and Win 7 HP isntalled?
 
Dunno what you mean by "Win 7 HP" but I'm using about 30-35% of my 120 GB (112 GiB) SSD with Windows 7, about 2-3 GiB of games and a variety of applications (Office 2007 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Adobe Fireworks CS5, Adobe Audition 3, TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4, etc.).
 
I picked up a pair of 40GB kingston SSDs back in Jan, and I stuck them in my system in RAID-0. These were also my first SSDs and first time setting up RAID-0 and it went smooth.

There is a big noticeable performance boost, and mine show no signs of slowing down yet. :)
 
Im on the OCZ forums and reading around - its actually hurting my head reading through the posts there. Saying i have to leave so much free for provisioning etc - didnt realise this will get so technical!

Adz you have have a newer mobo to me, dont know if it will make a difference being on the P45 chipset to set up How often are you doing 'maintenance' on your SSDs?

i guess i should first of all just put them in my current set up and flash them to the latest firmware before doing anything else?
 
Naan H said:
Im on the OCZ forums and reading around - its actually hurting my head reading through the posts there. Saying i have to leave so much free for provisioning etc - didnt realise this will get so technical!
Click to expand...
Don't worry about provisioning. It's been recommended for years to never completely fill up an HDD, so simply continue to do this with an SSD.

With the 120 GB Vertex 2E for example, there's already 8 GB set aside so as long as you never fill it up beyond say 100 GB (93 GiB) then you'll be leaving over 20% free, which is fine.

Naan H said:
i guess i should first of all just put them in my current set up and flash them to the latest firmware before doing anything else?
Click to expand...
Yep.
 
Naan_H said:
Adz you have have a newer mobo to me, dont know if it will make a difference being on the P45 chipset to set up How often are you doing 'maintenance' on your SSDs?
Click to expand...

Erm never, am I suppose too? :p and what do you mean by maintenance??? (lol)
 
Well I'm no expert but I guess it depends on the controller your SSDs use. If you look above as it does not support TRIM in RAID you need to leave your pc on idle for an hour or so for it to do its thing
 
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