which raid card for 2 ssd's?

Necrovaris · 28 Sep 2009 at 00:43

Hi there.

With windows 7 just around the corner I was looking at picking up 2 Crucial M225 64GB SSD's and whacking them in raid0 for some sexy speed.

However I am looking at what would be the best raid card to do the job or would onboard be better? 2 ports will be enough, but theres so many options out there with very little in the way of reviews for them, could anyone reccomend a card that would do the job, ideally with a nice large cache on it to help eliminate any remaining "stuttering" issues that exist.

Cheers

dr4g0nf1y · 28 Sep 2009 at 01:05

first of all you wouldn't need a card, secondly not all SSD's can take RAID (this one to my knowledge doesn't) and you'd get a faster speed from the crucial 128GB

Necrovaris · 28 Sep 2009 at 01:13

Oh ok, I fnd a lot of reviews about SSD's saying opposite things, so atm its all a bit confusing.

So for windows 7 youd say the 128gb would be the best option?

dr4g0nf1y · 28 Sep 2009 at 01:21

I've been toying about and if you're thinking about 128GB anyway then get a single 128. the drive itself is faster for both read and write and has better reliability for a single drive, plus also cheaper in the long run.

Necrovaris · 28 Sep 2009 at 01:33

thanks!

Zarf · 28 Sep 2009 at 03:02

Necrovaris said:
Hi there.

With windows 7 just around the corner I was looking at picking up 2 Crucial M225 64GB SSD's and whacking them in raid0 for some sexy speed.

However I am looking at what would be the best raid card to do the job or would onboard be better? 2 ports will be enough, but theres so many options out there with very little in the way of reviews for them, could anyone reccomend a card that would do the job, ideally with a nice large cache on it to help eliminate any remaining "stuttering" issues that exist.
Cheers

OK, sorry, but that other guy doen't know what he's on about.
Those SSD's (and indeed any) would be fine in RAID, They have plenty of cache and a decent controller so they are inherantly immune to stuttering.

Your onboard will probably be fine, Intel boards made in the last couple of years are based on the ICH9 and ICH10 southbridges, which don't become a bottleneck in RAID0 until around 600MB/s throughput, so you'd be fine up until around 4 SSD's.

The only issue with RAID atm is that currently you can't use the manual Indilinx TRIM tools on a RAID array, but any performance loss on a used "untrimmed" drive would be more than made up by the gains from the Array.
Later this year Intel should be providing new drivers that allow TRIM commands to be passed through if you're using RAID on one of their southbridges, And Crucial should pass on the new "Garbage Collection" Indilinx firmware which cleans up the drives whilst idle even if their in an array.

Performance wise 90% of your benefits come from using an SSD thanks to the low access times, adding a second in the array will speed things up but it's certainly not as noticable. If you work with large video files you might find it useful, but it certainly wont feel twice as fast for most things.

For my money, I'd get two in RAID0, at the end of the day it is more performance for the same dosh.

Duff-Man · 28 Sep 2009 at 03:59

^^^ What he said

Although I would probably be tempted to stick to a single 128Gb drive, leaving the capacity to add another later (when the whole RAID-TRIM thing has been fully sorted). You should have no problems sticking two 64Gb drives in RAID0 though, without a specialised controller, and it should give you better performance than a single 128Gb drive - particularly for large sequential file transfers.

dr4g0nf1y · 28 Sep 2009 at 10:12

Zarf said:
OK, sorry, but that other guy doen't know what he's on about.

Really mate?

The only thing I wasn't sure about was if that is product was suitable and I stated that. As I've previously asked this question before I think I'd know, unless I was given bad advice myself.

some of the older cards in circulation don't include an internal RAID 0 architecture inside the micro controller thus they can be used in RAID 0 but you wouldn't get the performance from one that does (and looking at the 64gb it doesn't), but like I said earlier it's not stated so you'd have to look.

jbloggs · 28 Sep 2009 at 10:48

I have 2 Intel X25-M G2s in RAID0 on the Intel ICH10R and they work very well together, no bottleneck etc over 500MB/s Average read in HDTach (some benches in the Intel X25-M thread if you're interested), so the Crucial 64GB SSDs will also work well in RAID0...

Jimbo Mahoney · 28 Sep 2009 at 14:14

dr4g0nf1y said:
some of the older cards in circulation don't include an internal RAID 0 architecture inside the micro controller thus they can be used in RAID 0 but you wouldn't get the performance from one that does (and looking at the 64gb it doesn't), but like I said earlier it's not stated so you'd have to look.

I think you're (understandably) confused between RAID 0 provided by the motherboard/addon card and the RAID 0 that is 'built-in' to some SSDs.

In either case, RAID 0 will work with SSDs.

Phunky Phish · 28 Sep 2009 at 16:01

I read somewhere that one of the SSD manufacturers had put TRIM functionality into the controller, so even in raid the TRIM function still works.

Also due to the nature of SSD's and read write they are more suited to small to medium file sizes than to working with large files. I have read (and I could be wrong) that it is recommended to use HDD for music, video etc as transfer speeds for continuos read/write is about the same but the life of an SSD working with large files is significantly shortened.

The SSD really comes into its own with the 0ms access times so the greatest advantage is using with your OS and apps.

I have a P128 SSD on Win7 beta build and to be honest its so quick I dont think I could see, or notice, any further speed increase!

However, I am no expert and will not be held liable if I am totally wrong! Mind you, good food for the argument!

Necrovaris · 28 Sep 2009 at 17:40

This thread alone prooves my point of many differing views

ChileanLlama · 28 Sep 2009 at 18:36

I'm running 2x256gb M225's in RAID0 on ICH10R.

Unless you have specific uses for the drives in RAID0, don't expect to see any major improvement over a single SSD for general windows use, app and games loading. A single 128gb M225 is slightly cheaper than 2x64gb drives - together with less complexity and TRIM working in Windows7 sooner than RAID will be supported.

Lastly for 99% of things when it comes to setting them up are no different to traditional HDs - the key difference in Windows is a few tweaks that Windows7 will manage for you, and TRIM support which is effectively integrated defragging for SSDs.

There's too many myths, rumours and scaremongers saying stuff about SSDs. Get one and enjoy the speed improvement - everything else is pretty much trivial and TBH you can forget about - even TRIM

bledd · 28 Sep 2009 at 19:05

dr4g0nf1y said:
first of all you wouldn't need a card, secondly not all SSD's can take RAID (this one to my knowledge doesn't) and you'd get a faster speed from the crucial 128GB

afraid you're wrong on all 3 points there mate

some motherboards have onboard raid, but if his doesn't, he'll need a raid card. a 3rd party raid card may well have better performance than the onboard anyway

all SSD's can 'take' raid, but not all raid controllers can support TRIM in raid yet, this is what you'll want..

2x64gb drives in RAID0 will have faster read/write speeds for large files than a single 128

Necrovaris · 28 Sep 2009 at 21:25

Well im running a striker II extreme, and it will be for gaming mainly.

johnerz · 30 Sep 2009 at 23:24

ChileanLlama said:
I'm running 2x256gb M225's in RAID0 on ICH10R.

Unless you have specific uses for the drives in RAID0, don't expect to see any major improvement over a single SSD for general windows use, app and games loading. A single 128gb M225 is slightly cheaper than 2x64gb drives - together with less complexity and TRIM working in Windows7 sooner than RAID will be supported.

Lastly for 99% of things when it comes to setting them up are no different to traditional HDs - the key difference in Windows is a few tweaks that Windows7 will manage for you, and TRIM support which is effectively integrated defragging for SSDs.

There's too many myths, rumours and scaremongers saying stuff about SSDs. Get one and enjoy the speed improvement - everything else is pretty much trivial and TBH you can forget about - even TRIM

Agreed.
Whilst raid 0 is/will be faster, I, don't think most "average" users will notice the gains from raid,

Happy to be proved wrong