Which raid card?

[Necrovaris]

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? 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

 

[sub mesa]

Its much better to buy a good SSD than to buy multiple less good SSDs and put them in RAID0. So i would concentrate on Intel X25-M (G2) because that's the best controller you can find right now, and it has decent firmware without any real weakness.

If you are to use RAID, i would suggest onboard Intel ICHxR-based RAID drivers since they are able to use RAM writeback as the only Windows-based RAID engine able to. You will get some of the writing benefits expensive RAID adaptors have.

Also note if you connect very fast SSDs to hardware RAID controllers you may slow down your array because the RAID controllers cannot keep up with the IOps processing level of SSDs. For example, i don't think you can find any RAID card that is fast enough to saturate 10 Intel SSDs, and probably even half of that would already lead to performance degradation.

 

[MRFS]

Wait!!

Intel's RS2BL080 and RS2BL040 support SAS/6G and SATA/6G interface speeds:
http://www.intel.com/Products/Server/RAID-controllers/RS2BL080/RS2BL080-overview.htm
http://www.intel.com/Products/Server/RAID-controllers/RS2BL040/RS2BL040-overview.htm

Highpoint have announced this model 4460:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/PDF/RR4460/RocketRAID%204460%20Datasheet.pdf

And SATA/6G SSDs are worth waiting for:
the fastest SSDs are now almost saturating the SATA/3G interface,
after allowances are made for controller computational overhead.

When SATA/6G SSDs become more widely available,
the costs of SATA/3G SSDs should drop: so,
at that time you'll have more devices to choose from.


If you want to get going with SAS/6G or SATA/6G HDDs,
Seagate has them now:

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/savvio/savvio_15k.2/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-barracuda-xt-6gbs-sata,8703.html


MRFS

 

[MRFS]

Another factor to consider is TRIM support
in any RAID controller that you decide to use
e.g. ICH10R was not originally designed to include TRIM.

So, check with the controller manufacturer
to confirm whether or not TRIM is supported,
either from the factory, or via an updated
device driver.

You'll want TRIM support for better garbage
collection in future SSDs.


MRFS