Raid card question

Nevakonaza · 9 Jun 2012 at 06:00

Hey guys,

I plan to get a Raid Card of some sort so i can Raid 0 my two OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSDs,As my motherboard does not support Raid.

However im confused (does not take a lot

)

I know my SSDs are Sata2,But if i get a Sata2 raid card will the speeds of my SSDs combined be limited or held back?

Should i be looking for a Sata3 raid card just so i know it would be any bottleneck to my SSDs?

My motherboard is (P7H55-M/USB3)...i only have a Pci-e X1 slot free so the raid card would have to be Pci-e x1...is this a bottleneck itself?

Thanks.

rpstewart · 9 Jun 2012 at 11:17

Any decent RAID card should allow full speed between the controller chip and the ports on the card however whether the controller itself is capable of handling both ports running almost flat out will depend very much on the controller in question. Unfortunately PCI-E 1x controllers tend to be based on cheap controllers so you may end up being throttled there.

Assuming the controller is OK then there's the bus itself to worry about, you've got PCI-E v2 slots at least which means there's 500MB/s of available bandwidth which will be just about enough if the controllers up to it.

The big question though is why RAID0? Unless you desperately need all the space as a single drive I wouldn't bother, the real world improvements aren't that great.

Nevakonaza · 9 Jun 2012 at 15:25

Thanks for replying.

The big question though is why RAID0? Unless you desperately need all the space as a single drive I wouldn't bother, the real world improvements aren't that great.

Yeah,I really would like to have both my SSDs strapped together so the space is as a single drive plus the speed gains.

I have been looking at one raid card, "HighPoint RocketRAID 620"....its about £43 though inc delivery,Not sure if a better option would be to just buy a Sandisk Extreme SSD 120GB and be done with it,as my motherboard supports SATA 6Gb/s.

Phemo · 9 Jun 2012 at 15:43

I'd just get a single larger drive. Probably going to be faster anyway, less hassle and you would lose TRIM support in RAID.