RAID0 Help Please!

mkohman

mkohman

mkohman

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1 Sep 2009
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197
Hey Guys,

Finally I have built my PC and so far touch wood I am very pleased.. Here are my hardware:


Antec P183 Case

2 x 40GB Kingston SSD for Main C Drive in Raid0 Array.

Gigabyte EX58-UD5 Intel X58 Motherboard

Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 2.66Ghz

Corsair H50-1

Corsair XMS3 6GB PC3-12800C9 DDR3

Sapphire 5770 1GB New Edition

Corsair 1000W Power Supply

4 x 1.5 TB seagate 7200 RPM 32mb cache for storage

There are a few things I wanted to ask thanks for the help of the people on here and other forums I have managed to RAID0 my 2 x Kingston 40GB SSD Drives in RAID0 and used default stripe as 128kb is this a prefered stripe size or should I have chosen anything less?

Also I am going to Raid 0 my 4 x 1.5 TB seagate 7200 RPM 32mb cache in 2 seperate Raid0 (2 x drives for movies and 2 x drives for storage and other downloads) is it reccomended to do them in RAID0 and also what stripe size should I use?

Finally when I tried to put the OC profile for the same combination I purchased from OC previousley it was not stable at all. So I followed a guide where I changed a few things in bios and my OC is stable and solid as a rock . Did prime 95 for 2 hrs and no errors or faults. However my Ram was not majorly boosted I set the System memory multiplier to 6 and the ram sets that to 1200mhz and the voltage is 1.500V now if I start changing the multiplier to 8 and up the voltage the system becomes unstable .. is there any reccomended setting please can you guide or will it not really make a big difference?

Sorry for thousand questions but would really appreciate the help :) Thank you .
 
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PSU is wildly overspecified for the computer, but I daresay you've already been told this. If you put storage drives in raid 0 you get performance where you don't need it, and if one dies you loose all the data instead of half of it. You either want raid 5 across all four drives or no raid at all. Either way I suggest keeping backups.

Optimising stripe size for raid 0 ssd is probably more hassle than its worth, the ocz forums are where I'd look for advice.

The stable settings for one system will not necessarily work on another system with similar hardware. So there are no recommended settings as such, you have to tweak it for your individual hardware. There are a lot of guides on this, most of which will point out that "stable as a rock" cannot be inferred from two hours of prime 95. My current efforts are logged in my sig, I don't think it's particularly readable at present though.

Good luck
 
JonJ678 said:
PSU is wildly overspecified for the computer, but I daresay you've already been told this. If you put storage drives in raid 0 you get performance where you don't need it, and if one dies you loose all the data instead of half of it. You either want raid 5 across all four drives or no raid at all. Either way I suggest keeping backups.

Optimising stripe size for raid 0 ssd is probably more hassle than its worth, the ocz forums are where I'd look for advice.

The stable settings for one system will not necessarily work on another system with similar hardware. So there are no recommended settings as such, you have to tweak it for your individual hardware. There are a lot of guides on this, most of which will point out that "stable as a rock" cannot be inferred from two hours of prime 95. My current efforts are logged in my sig, I don't think it's particularly readable at present though.

Good luck
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Thank you .. you mean my power supply is an overkill? I think it may be best to keep them as single drives. I guess I won't really be gaining much difference. I thought it would make things faster but if not needed than not really worth, I guess you are right in saying you will loose all data if one of the drives die.

Also what would be the best setting for my ram? I mean to increase speed? what should the system memory setting be 6 at 1200 or 8 at 1600 and also what should I put the voltage at? Is there a limit to the voltage that should be applied? I may in future up the ram to 12 GB by buying another set of 3 x 2GB RAM will I need to change the settings in bios again or should it be ok when added? Thanks..
 
It's easily 400W more than required. Not the worst thing to overspecify though, I'm using a 860W psu on a system which needs about 300 on the basis that it makes little noise when under such little stress, and I can add whatever mix of hardware I like to it without concern. A cheaper one would have done just fine though.

Faster is good, but faster drives at the expense of probability of failure isn't so good unless you have it all backed up. Raid 5 would leave you with a single 4.5tb volume (something like 4.2tb in practice), which will survive a drive failure. It wont survive virus/user error/anything that kills two drives, and it's arguably overkill for home use where downtime doesn't matter very much. Good technology though, I ran a four disk raid five for ages.

Regarding ram. Assuming you run the processor at 200x20, which should be about the limits you reach on this hardware, if you can get the ram to run at 1600mhz cas 8 I think you should be pleased. It'll need more than 1.5V, don't go over 1.65V unless you're prepared to spend more time researching what you're doing. Otherwise I'm running at 1200mhz cas 6 as I can't get 1600mhz stable. Moving to 12gb makes everything more difficult, you will not get the same ram speed/timings as with 6gb, and probably won't get the same cpu frequency either. Not recommended unless you need more than 6gb.

e.g. 4ghz stable with 6gb took me about an hour of messing around and a lot of overnight testing. 4ghz stable with 12gb has taken upwards of 30 hours of tweaking, and I've not got it properly stable over 4ghz yet.
 
JonJ678 said:
It's easily 400W more than required. Not the worst thing to overspecify though, I'm using a 860W psu on a system which needs about 300 on the basis that it makes little noise when under such little stress, and I can add whatever mix of hardware I like to it without concern. A cheaper one would have done just fine though.

Faster is good, but faster drives at the expense of probability of failure isn't so good unless you have it all backed up. Raid 5 would leave you with a single 4.5tb volume (something like 4.2tb in practice), which will survive a drive failure. It wont survive virus/user error/anything that kills two drives, and it's arguably overkill for home use where downtime doesn't matter very much. Good technology though, I ran a four disk raid five for ages.

Regarding ram. Assuming you run the processor at 200x20, which should be about the limits you reach on this hardware, if you can get the ram to run at 1600mhz cas 8 I think you should be pleased. It'll need more than 1.5V, don't go over 1.65V unless you're prepared to spend more time researching what you're doing. Otherwise I'm running at 1200mhz cas 6 as I can't get 1600mhz stable. Moving to 12gb makes everything more difficult, you will not get the same ram speed/timings as with 6gb, and probably won't get the same cpu frequency either. Not recommended unless you need more than 6gb.

e.g. 4ghz stable with 6gb took me about an hour of messing around and a lot of overnight testing. 4ghz stable with 12gb has taken upwards of 30 hours of tweaking, and I've not got it properly stable over 4ghz yet.
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Thanks for all your help mate.. I am going to stick with 6GB RAM my 4GHZ seems stable at the minute touch wood .. I dont stress out my pc and I am not a gamer anyway so 6 GB is more than enough .. The only thing left to decide is wether to Raid0 or Raid 5.. I think I am just going to leave them as 4 x 1.5tb hdd as single drives that way if one fails I am not loosing all data.. Thanks for your help.

Just one last thing. Is there anything I need to do to improve or boost my Raid0 with my 2 x 40GB Kingston SSD which is already in Raid 0 at the minute? My windows boot times seems to be fairly long approx 60 secx or so but once I am up and runnig everything is nice and fast. :) Anything I need to or should do to improve this "for example I read somewhere that I should turn of defragmanting in windows 7 for this drive as its a SSD is this true? How would I do that if so and is there arnything else you would reccomend.." Thank you..
 
You can disable Defrag by navigating to Start>Accessories>System Tools>Task Schelduler>Taks Scheduler Library>Microsoft>Windows>Defrag Then right click on it and disable.

You will need to manually run the defrag service on you other mechanical drives to clean them up from time to time.

However, I don't think that doing this will help your boot-up time. How full is your RAID0 SSD set-up? The problem is with RAID arrays and SSDs at the moment is that there is no way to send automatic TRIM commands to them. You would need to break the array, run a manual garbage collection program (I'm sure Kingston have a application for doing this on their website) and then rebuild the array.

It might also be worth upgrading to the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager, if you haven't already.

60secs seems a long time for an SSD RAID0 array to be taking to boot-up.
 
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ejr22 said:
You would need to break the array, run a manual garbage collection program (I'm sure Kingston have a application for doing this on their website) and then rebuild the array.

It might also be worth upgrading to the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager, if you haven't already.

60secs seems a long time for an SSD RAID0 array to be taking to boot-up.
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Hey, thanks for the info. Breaking the array? I just built this machine everything is freshly installed.. I have approx 45GB free space out of 80GB.. I have not installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.. Would you reccomend me to do this? What does this do and how will it help me?

Thanks
 
I think you won't get a great speed increase with the SSD in RAID0, but don't think about the failure of 1 of the drives as a reason not to do it. If you store your OS on 1 drive and it fails, you will have the same problem. Always backup.. plenty of free tools out there, or use Acronis if you want to "set it and forget it".
 
There is a link for SATA RAID on the drivers download page for the Gigabyte EX58 UD5 and it has:

1 - GIGABYTE SATA2 RAID Driver

2 - GIGABYTE SATA2 Preinstall driver (For AHCI / RAID Mode)
Note: Press F6 during Windows* setup to read from floppy.

3 - Intel SATA RAID Driver

Which one of these shall I install? Shall I install all of them and also will this make an improvement over the booting time or in general for the 2 x 40gb Kingston SSD in Raid0..
 
Guys,

Please note this is actually my first time building a Raid. I want to check a few things with you guys. I built my pc from new with all new hardware as mentioned above.. Please correct me if I did anything wrong. When I put the 2 x 40GB Kingston SSD drives in 2 of the white SATA ports on the motherboard it did not detect them in RAID so I connect them to the blue SATA port on the motherboard.. Is this normal or do I need to install something to make them work on the white SATA ports? Is there any advantage to this? Maybe this is why my windows is taking long to boot up then usual as I may have initially set it up wrong.. Please can you guys help me out on this one. Thank you..
 
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