New RAID setup

justinmg

justinmg

justinmg

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19 Jan 2009
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I have set up two Samsung MLC 64Gb drves in RAID 0, on a Silicon Image based 3132 PCI E card.
I have freshly installed Vista, and run SSD tweak, and turned on write cache and advanced performance. I have a stripe of 128. I dont know what an offset is or how to change it!
I am getting 130 MB/s read, which seems pretty low to me. Is there anything else I should be doing?
 
For Alignment have a look at this guide. It's for OCZ drives but I see no reason why it shouldn't be the same for Samsung.

The offset typically recommended for a RAID array of SSD's is 128k (32k for a single drive I believe).

And yes I would think you should be getting far better results than those. Make sure all your drivers are up to date, it might also be worth trying the onboard controller rather than the card as for RAID 0 cards typically don't offer much of an improvement, they usually are better suited to those RAID's requiring parity, RAID 5 etc. If you have an Intel chipset mobo with either ICH9R or ICH10R controller then you should be fine using that and get better results. Not sure about nVidia chipsets I'm afraid.

edit: oh and I should have said that aligning the array now will mean a complete reload too... sorry!
 
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Vista should have given the correct partition offset anyway on a fresh install.
My bet is that the SATA card is a bit poo - try using onboard.

Try just moving the drives straight across, if you are lucky your raid controller will recognise the foreign config and you'll be able to avoid another reinstall.
 
I am using the card as there is no onboard RAID. The figures look better than for a single drive, so I guess I will just have to put up with it.
Cananyone tell by looking at the smaller data chunks if this setup as it is will be better than non RAIDed drives for general office use with some video and photo proccessing?
 
justinmg said:
I am using the card as there is no onboard RAID. The figures look better than for a single drive, so I guess I will just have to put up with it.
Cananyone tell by looking at the smaller data chunks if this setup as it is will be better than non RAIDed drives for general office use with some video and photo proccessing?
Click to expand...

you can't really go wrong performance wise with RAID0, especially with SSD's.
You'll be fine for any workloads.

Try one of of 2 or 4 port adaptec cards, though your money might be better invested on just getting a decent motherboard to begin with.

Are you certain there's no Onboard RAID? I'm surprised if it's capable of running Vista (pretty much every motherboard in the last few years has the feature) Can you post your motherboard model?
You might just need to change the mode in BIOS (From AHCI to RAID) to enable RAID functionality.
 
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