SSD Raid woes

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Hi Guys,

Just bought a cheapo Lycom Raid controller and two 60gb Vertex 2E's, only to realise my PCI-E X1 slot's on my Abit IP35-E won't give the drives the data quick enough for them to even run as quick as a single drive (I'm only hitting 170mbps read and write which is obviously nowhere near what it should be).

Can anyone suggest an alternate solution apart from buying a new motherboard? Would something like this work?
 
Thanks for the idea, but I bought two smaller drives specifically to Raid them. My fault for not reading up on my motherboard specs when I bought them.

Does anyone think that Lycom 2xSATA -> 1xSATA would work and be quick?
 
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Does anyone think that Lycom 2xSATA -> 1xSATA would work and be quick?
Are you thinking of one of their 2x2.5" into 1x3.5" caddy things? If so it'll work but it won't be quick, it's a port multiplier based solution so it's limited by the speed of the single link back to the host PC.
 
why don't you use onboard RAID for the SSD's? If you are already using the onboard ports, move those drives onto your Lycom.
 
Are you thinking of one of their 2x2.5" into 1x3.5" caddy things? If so it'll work but it won't be quick, it's a port multiplier based solution so it's limited by the speed of the single link back to the host PC.

Is that still the case when it mentions raid and the 3gbps limit would stop the two drives running at 550mbps?
 
Judging by your speeds you only have PCI-E 1.0/1.1 as well, which is half as fast as PCI-E 2.0 (250 MB/s vs 500 MB/s per lane).

A 3 Gbps SATA port would give you up to 384 MB/s, enough for a single Vertex 2E to work at maximum speed but not two. If you don't have on-board RAID though, you only really have two options if you want to run the drives at maximum speed:

1) Run them as separate drives via 2 SATA ports (faster than your current setup but no RAID)
2) Get a new motherboard with RAID and/or a better array of PCI-E slots.
 
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Judging by your speeds you only have PCI-E 1.0 as well, which is half as fast as PCI-E 2.0 (250 MB/s vs 500 MB/s per lane).

A 3 Gbps SATA port would give you up to 384 MB/s, enough for a single Vertex 2E to work at maximum speed but not two. If you don't have on-board RAID though, you only really have two options if you want to run the drives at maximum speed:

1) Run them as separate drives via 2 SATA ports (faster than your current setup but no RAID)
2) Get a new motherboard with RAID and/or a better array of PCI-E slots.

Yeah, I guess I'll have to either see if I can send them back, or wait until I can afford to upgrade everything.
 
Unless you work with large video files (copying/moving) and/or regularly unzipping compressed large archives you will see absolutely no (real world) performance gain using RAID0 as opposed to using an SSD setup as a single SSD...so, if you do neither of these I would forget about trying to setup RAID0...
 
Just thought id ask are you planning to boot of the SSD raid? if your using another drive for the O/S you could just connect the SSD's to normal ports and raid them in windows drive manager (faster than motherboard on-board raid)
 
Yeah, I was going to boot to the drives. Anyway I'm going to send these back now, I bought them to replace my broken drive which I'm sending back, but if I can't get them to work properly, then I might as well wait for my old drive to be replaced.
 
No raid on this motherboard.

Wow, that sucks. Didn't even think you could get motherboards without onboard RAID any more (Every board i've had for about the last 6 years came with it, even the cheap £30 ones)

Get yourself a new board. It's your only option if you want decent RAID performance. Any other PCI-E RAID controller would be crippled by the X1 slot at 250MB/s.
 
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