Using Z68 acceleration on a RAID?

skyripper

skyripper

skyripper

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I'm going to put a raid array together (Raid 5 or Raid 0+1) as I move stuff from my old rig to my new one.

I know an SSD can be used to cache a physical drive using a z68 (I've got a Gigabyte Z68-UD4-B3) - can the same trick be used on a Raid array?
 
Yes.

I set up a RAID1 (2 x 1TB 7200rpm) with an SSD for cache in front. Works fine.

The only issue is upgrading the firmware for the SSD, you have to take it out of cache before doing the necessaries and then put it back.
 
Unless you have your PC running on battery backup, just use enhanced mode.
Maximised mode or whatever it's called is pointless without some protection against power outages.
 
Running Enhanced mode now, Maximised was my first attempt - ended up with a freeze, a BSOD and then a non-booting windows :) - not confidence inspiring.

Quick trip to the Intel Raid BIOS to remove the acceleration and every back to normal.

Am running some really, really pointless tests on it now - repeated runs of HDTune.

Empty cache - max 93mb, min 27mb, avg 67mb, access time 13ms
Second run - max 241mb, min 49mb, avg 126mb, access time 0.1ms
Third run - max 311mb, min 82mb, avg 171mb, access time 0.1ms

So the technology works - its caching and returning data much quicker - BUT I've now got a SSD cache full of random sectors being used by HDTune... which is useless for anything but pretty graphs :D

I'll let it do its thing caching windows and steam and see how that goes instead.
 
It works great! The only problem I had was, trying to find a smallish SSD (60GB maximum cache) that can match the 4k write speeds of a 7200rpm hard drive.
Ended up with an M4 64GB but it's not quite ideal. Hopefully Intel or someone will bring out a perfect partner for it :)
 
Been running with SSD acceleration for a couple of weeks now. When it works, its very effective. BUT I have found on at least three occasions my machine starts up and the IRST software decides theres an issue with the SSD, so it disables the acceleration. The only way to restore it is a quick trip into the Raid BIOS, delete the Raid-0 (From the SSD!) and set it all back up again within Windows.

At this point the RAID is significantly slower to boot, especially as all the tweaks for using an SSD have been done, so theres no prefetch or other windows 7 jinx to speed things up.

I'm going to move my Win 7 install back to the SSD and look at Z68 Accelleration when intel have released a few updates to the drivers.

And if they could make it so it didnt wipe the whole of the disk even when you only want to use a portion - because thats highly annoying too.
 
Check the BIOS version of your board. Mine was doing similar until I flashed the latest BIOS and installed the latest RST driver.
 
Cheers, I may give that a try. It would be nice to have it doing its thing, but I have a feeling I'll still want to have a separate C: partition on the SSD for the OS, and keep the big array with a small SSD cache.
 
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