Will 2x RAID 0 / SATA 2 achieve SATA 3 speed?

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rcald2000

rcald2000

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I have a Dell Optiplex 380 that only has a SATA 2 (3.0 Gbps) controller, therefore the Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD only achieves 265/244 MBps read/write sequential speeds.

Question: Would placing these drives into a RAID 0 array bring me within striking distance of achieving the SATA 3 (6.0 Gbps) speeds?
 
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Your boot is massively faster not due to the increased read/write speed between ssd and hdd, but because of the instant seek times of the ssd.
During boot you are not read/writting large files, but many many small files. So the transfer of these small files never even has the chance to even hit triple digit MBps before it is moving to the next file.
Since a raid array does nothing to decrease the seek time, this means that RAID 0 will do nothing to reduce boot time.
RAID 0 is only going to show large gains in sequential data, booting or opening a program is far from sequential

IF the program has larger files then opening the program could be faster with an array, but for the most part it is just like the OS where you opening many...
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boosted1g

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Depends on the quality of the raid controller.

WIth that said there is really no reason to do this.

First and foremost with Raid 0 you have doubled your chances for data loss as half of the file is one drive and half on the other. Thus if you loose data on one drive, you lost all of the data.

Secondly the max speed is only helpful if you can go at max speed.
Most small file transfers are never going to go fast enough to tell the difference between SATA 2 and 3.
The only way you would notice the difference is if you are transfering large files to another SSD drive, or if you are editing a photo/video that is gigabytes in size and it is transferring it between ram and ssd frequently.
 
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rcald2000

rcald2000

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Yes, I'm aware of the downsides of RAID 0. These computers would only have windows 10 and office 365; no personal data.

So there are two factors to consider: throughput (transfer rate) and latency. I'm aware that the latency being cut in half is worth it to me. I'm also aware of the diminishing returns at lower queue depths. However, I'm curious if this will allow the machine to boot 50% or 100% faster. I'm also curious if the chrome browser will be more responsive for users. These are very old computers, therefore I'm simply trying to prop them up until newer ones are donated to this community center. By the way, these computers unfortunately don't have Dell Perc controllers, therefore I could be react on Windows software RAID.

Follow-up question: Do you or anyone reading this thread know of any Dell hardware controllers that would be a good match for placing two of these SATA 3 drives in RAID 0? What I'd really like to achieve is placing a M.2 controller card into the PCIe slot, along with a Samsung 960 EVO M.2, however I question if I could boot from the drive or not. Thanks for your help.
 
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boosted1g

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Your boot is massively faster not due to the increased read/write speed between ssd and hdd, but because of the instant seek times of the ssd.
During boot you are not read/writting large files, but many many small files. So the transfer of these small files never even has the chance to even hit triple digit MBps before it is moving to the next file.
Since a raid array does nothing to decrease the seek time, this means that RAID 0 will do nothing to reduce boot time.
RAID 0 is only going to show large gains in sequential data, booting or opening a program is far from sequential

IF the program has larger files then opening the program could be faster with an array, but for the most part it is just like the OS where you opening many small files. Once the program is open (like chrome) the speed of your drive is irrelevant because it is being ran out of memory and not the drive.


Any dell PERC card will handle raid 0 just fine.
As stated above though this is not going to speed up the system for your intentions. The cpu and memory speed of that older setup is your real slow-down
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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" These are very old computers, therefore I'm simply trying to prop them up until newer ones are donated to this community center."
Click to expand...

In that sort installation, I would not bother one whit about SSD + RAID 0.
The typical user would not notice any difference between those drives in RAID 0 or not RAID 0.
And your personal maintenance overhead goes up.

And if they're old enough to have only SATA II ports, forget about booting from NVMe drives, PCI-e slot or no.
 
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