Revodrive/s vs Multiple SSD's

[rush_syndrome]

I am currently building what I hope to be a bit of a monster and I want full on disk performance using RAIDed SSD's. So the question is...

Do I hang around for the 240GB Revo at £599 and wait for the teething problems to get sorted, or buy now and go for FOUR Crucial C300 64GB SSD's @ £479.35, then run them in RAID 0 on an LSi-4i MegaRaid? If I choose the latter, then I presume I am getting the same 240GB, at a lesser cost but much faster? Does anyone have any benchies for a 4 way RAID O config with the LSi MegaRaid4i on SSD's? Given the cost of four C300's with the LSi card, that amounts to £789, so is buying two 120GB Revo's, and raiding them in software an option? I already bought the card and the cable, it's just the drives I am waiting on. The mobo (UD9) supports a load of RAID, but the LSi will allow 4 SSD's at RAID 0 which the onboard does not. I want to use the little Crucials because they are SATA3, and I am hoping to get close to maxing out the PCIE bus bandwidth with all 4 drives. I'm not overly worried about the write speeds as most of the writing will be done on the other RAID 5 array.

If I decide to go down the 64GB Crucial C300 route, does anyone know if they have sorted out their 0002 firmware nightmares? Also, I am presuming that the mad array will be loads faster but whats the negatives?

I am building this primarily as a games machine although it is also going to be used as a media server, but as stated the media is to be stored on another RAID 5 array, these RAID 0 discs will just be for the OS and any other app that needs fast disc read access. Also I am presuming I cannot use TRIM, and that I will have to leave free space, the disks will get a couple of partitions, and I paln on dual booting XP with Win7.

These new PCIE Revo's are taking me off my chosen SSD plan, but these are also having teething problems, and I am totally unsure which route is the best to take!

Any advice greatly received

 

[f12f12]

does the raid controller and ssd's support TRIM? wouldn't be happy if i paid that much for it to slow to a snail after a year.

 

[Zarf]

Raiding Revo's (or any volumes for that matter) in software is an option, but you won't be able to have the OS booting from it.

If you've got the cash, 4x C300's on that LSI card is hard to beat. You'd be looking at around 1400MB/s sequential reads.

I will note that my RAID0 Intel drives don't feel that much faster than when I was only running a single drive. I'm now CPU bottlenecked during most loads.
If you have £800 to drop on storage though, I expect you have a pimped out i7 rig that can probably make more use of the extra bandwidth.

 

[rush_syndrome]

does the raid controller and ssd's support TRIM? wouldn't be happy if i paid that much for it to slow to a snail after a year.

Just looking into this as we speak, will post the results when I get them.

Raiding Revo's (or any volumes for that matter) in software is an option, but you won't be able to have the OS booting from it.

If you've got the cash, 4x C300's on that LSI card is hard to beat. You'd be looking at around 1400MB/s sequential reads.

I will note that my RAID0 Intel drives don't feel that much faster than when I was only running a single drive. I'm now CPU bottlenecked during most loads.
If you have £800 to drop on storage though, I expect you have a pimped out i7 rig that can probably make more use of the extra bandwidth.

1400MB Worth the £800 I think. The rig is not all top end, but I will be replacing the 930 with a 980X or similar at some time, the 930 is running @4.0Ghz but the board will allow me to mentalise its performance, and I have a radiator the size of a car It's also going to feature some novel refridgearation and I hope to post a build of it once I have enough pictures and all the toys arrive

Thanks for the input guys, its appreiated.

 

[loki_360]

any news on the speeds you got with the 4 drives? Currently got 2x 128gb Crucial m4 on a stripe with a lsi megaraid sas 9260-4i and it's slowed down possibly due to short amount of free space....