[Solved] Intel x25-m G2 80gb in raid-0 or Single OCZ Vertex 120 gb

I am planing on putting together a new rig by the end of the month and will definitely use an SSD as a boot drive.

The question is:

1. Should I get a single OCZ Vertex 120GB drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product

2. Or get a single Intel X25-m 80gb drive now and get an additional one once prices drop in few
months for a raid 0 setup.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820167016

Moreover, do you recommend on purchasing now or waiting till Black Friday, Holiday Season or after Holidays for a purchase date?
Prices have gone through the roof within the last week or so. I guess we can blame the introduction of Windows 7 or pre-holiday season hike.

Thanks for all responses.

I'd advise waiting for holidays sales and getting the Intel X-25.

OK, I will stick with one relatively larger SSD.


Should I get:

OCZ Vertex 120 GB

or

Crucial CT128M225 128GB

or

X25-M 160GB (when it gets to $400 range, is there a chance of that happening in December?)

The benchmarks performed on the site are reasonable; but onboard RAID does appear to scale far less well than software RAID0. Unfortunately if you need to boot from it that's all you can use.

For example, their STR's do not double when using RAID0; that's a wrong setup or bad efficiency RAID drivers. If one drive gets 250MB/s; two should get ~500MB/s; they get only ~400MB/s. The random read/write does scale as well though, so it stil has its usage the MB/s scores are irrelevant.

Don't go for any other SSD than the Intel though; its speed you want right? So pick the fastest SSD which is Intel by far. By determining which drive is fast, never look at MB/s as this score is irrelevant for system disks. Look at IOps or random read/write performance, and you can separate the boys from the men.

Indeed its more or less performance for free.

However it is a choice: using RAID drivers or not using RAID drivers. If you do not need to boot from it, software RAID (even in Windows itself) should be superior in performance and more reliable than those onboard RAID drivers; nVidia/ATi/VIA seem to be quite bad, same with Silicon Image/JMicron/Promise FastTrak.

With just one 160GB you can run it without any messy RAID drivers. However, i do feel the added performance of RAID0 makes sense and this would be the prefered choice for those who focus on performance.

The random I/O scores do improve with RAID0, not just sequential performance. You do need to setup the RAID properly to make it scale in random I/O:

• Use Vista/Win7/Linux to avoid stripe misalignment issues
• Use stripesizes of 128KiB or larger
• Make only one partition, created with Vista or Win7.
• Use proper RAID drivers
• Increase VFS read ahead values to get max read performance; in Windows these are registry hacks

However, RAIDs cannot use TRIM which is a big loss. I'm not sure about software RAID in Windows though; but i'd guess TRIM would work in that case.

One more reason software RAID is superior to driver/hardware RAID.

But yes it's a big miss; though it should not be impossible to 'pass through' the TRIM commands if the RAID driver supported it. You don't need TRIM at the very beginning when you start to use your system; you need it as time flies by and the SSD is running out of HPA remap blocks. So if you enable it in half a year or so, with newer RAID drivers that support TRIM, you should be fine. Of course, there is no guarantee the RAID drivers would work.

Another option would be to clone the drives, zero-write them, and restore the clone every half a year or so; that would have the same effect as the performance level would be reset. The zero-write part can be omitted with HPA erase utilities like "HDDErase" which work on SSDs like Intel X25-M.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fu [...] ch/?page=4 look here zenthar

sub mesa you sound like zenthar and obviously dont know what you are talking about " One more reason software RAID is superior to driver/hardware RAID." WHERE DID YOU READ THAT PC WORLD?

DUDE DONT LISTEN TO SUB MESA OR ZENTHAR LOOK AT THIS http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fu [...] ch/?page=4 503 MB/S WITH HARDWARE RAID ICH10R

Ok, I will assume you might not have understood my point of view.

When I said that SSDs BIG gain wasn't sequential read/write, I didn't meant performance was bad, I meant the performance gain it offered over traditional HDD wasn't competitive pricewise. You can get probably similar throughput by using 5 HD502HJ GB is RAID5 (5*55$ = 275$), but you also get data security AND a shitload of storage space (~2TB) all that for less than the price of a single X25-M.

I've seen figures of SSD in RAID at the end of the article I linked to it said "average 479.3MB/s reads" and "average 148MB/s for writes" so yes I knew. But the real shine of SSD is random write of small data because the "seek time" is 100-200 better than standard HDD, that is why even with very small transfer sizes (<4K), the X25 is able to do 30-40MB/s while standard HDD crawl to about 1-2MB/s. However, you will notice that for such transfer sized RAID gains much lower than for bigger transfer sizes, that is due to both little extra latency for RAID operations (when you have a seek time of 0.1ms, even an additional 0.1ms seems big ).

Don't get me wrong, I don't bash the X25-M, I think it's a gread SSD and am looking forward to buy one myself. However my foremost concern is people satisfaction of their system over time. I also believe that unless you play with big multimedia or CAD files, the gain from having 600$ worth of SSD in RAID0 might not be worth it, then again, if you have the money, why not.

My true and only performance-related argument about using SSDs in RAID is related to the support of the TRIM command. I'm sure it will soon, if not already, supported by some RAID controller, but one should make sure of it before embarking on this pricey road. As the article I linked to before mentioned, when the SSDs get "degraded", the performance can drop to ~258.2MB/s read. Still good, but not worth 600$.

@obamaliar: i performed advanced RAID testing for many years, and do feel i have a much deeper knowledge of many people even those writing reviews on reputable sites. I'd gladly explain what i mean with software RAID being superior to driver/hardware RAID, but not if you start being obnoxious.

What i meant was, that Software RAID would or at least should still allow the usage of TRIM even while using RAID, something that does not appear to be possible right now if you use Onboard RAID/Driver RAID. ICH10R falls into the last category; its not (true) software RAID in the sense that the operating system provides for these drivers and that some firmware allows booting Onboard RAIDs; something that is not possible with Software RAID on Windows. (*)

The reason RAID0 arrays are faster than a single disk is because during the time one drive is busy with one I/O request, the other is free to be used for another I/O request. So you have an array that can process two I/O's at the same time, instead of one by one in a serial order. In order for this to happen, the RAID needs to be properly setup and the operating system and application need to give enough tasks to the RAID array; expressed in queue depth. In the case of booting or launching an application these pretty much are single tasks: "finish this I/O request first because i cannot give you the second one until i know the contents of this I/O read request!". So the queue depth is 1 here, and only one drive in a RAID can be used leading to similar single-drive performance or even slightly lower due to added latency as Zenthar said. (**)

Zenthar is also spot-on with his argument that the MB/s speeds do not matter that much for a system drive; true performance is expressed in IOps and i don't think you fully understand its concepts yet.

(*) There is no reason Software RAIDs are not bootable if the boot loader supports this; for example FreeBSD can boot from software RAID-5 or RAID-6 arrays in ZFS configuration.

(**) The added latency is not 0.1 but is barely measurable on modern systems. The added latency of PCI subsystems does decrease performance, and RAID5 operations may add signicant latency but generally RAID0 and RAID1 or combinations of those have near-zero added latencies. The CPU usage is also close to nil.

now this makes sense didnt see this before but this DOES CONTRADICT ZENTHARS REASONING THAT THERE IS NOT MUCH TO GAIN BY GOING RAID AND THAT HAS BEEN MY POINT ALL ALONG

Please fix your caps lock before we continue our pleasant chat.

sorry my friend

Sometimes raw performance is not the only condideration and may not be the best choise.
The two SSd's I have are for Two systems, The Torqx is for a laptop (with single HDD bay) and I knew it was not as fast as the Intel, BUT it is 164% larger and at the time CHEAPER. The Intel SSD is for a desktop where I also have two pair of HDDs in raid 0, so I'm fine with the smaller size. And Bought it for $230 and they threw in a free Thermaltake ElementsS Case!!!

FWIW I tried a pair of 1TB WD Green drives in a RAID 0 configuration using the matrix RAID on my Core i7 920 / 12GB RAM system. A fresh install of Windows 7 RC booted about 10-15% faster (from the end of POST to presentation of the logon screen) than a single, non-RAID drive.

So RAID 0 gives you a measurable performance increase, but in practice it's not really noticeable and anyone who thinks that it's going to go, say, twice as fast because it has two drives has very unrealistic expectations.

if you read a little further you would see that i apologized to sub mesa and zenthar and i told sub mesa that he was right so you might read a little further before you start preaching

i think ich10r is considered software raid. if you install xp 64 you do need the floppy. i believe if you dont install the intel matrix storage manager then the os can pass the trim command but if you do install the matrix storage manager windows 7 cannot pass the trim command as of yet. the chipset drivers dont have anything to do with raid.

> the over all performance: Boot, application startup, Game Loadings ... will be better in Software RAID ? or Hardware RAID ?
The work required to run a RAID 0 set is pretty negligible, so it really doesn't matter. The same may not be true for other RAID organizations like RAID 5, though.

> Is the one i have on my Motherboard a Hardware RAID ?
The ICHxxR-based RAID chips use software RAID. The chips themselves are little more than I/O ports for the disks. The chipset's BIOS has enough smarts to support configuration and booting from a RAID set, but the heavy lifting is done by the chipset driver that gets loaded into Windows.

> I installed Windows 7, but suppose am going to install XP 64, After Setup RAID in Ctrl + I, do i have to provide RAID Drivers using floppy those i download from Intel to get them Recognized ? or is That a Software RAID ?
The ICH10R drivers are included in Windows 7 but not in Windows XP, and therefore you'd have to supply them on a floppy or CD during the installation. And yes, that's why it's "software RAID".

> Is there a Difference between Installing Windows 7 at Install time for (AHCI/SATA/RAID) etc with Windows Drivers ? or the Intel Drivers ? any performance increase ?
I can't imagine you'd see any difference in performance, especially with RAID 0 which basically requires zero CPU work. If there was a noticeable performance difference it would have to be due to some pretty gross flaw in the driver.