RAID with 2 Intel X25-V SSDs Asus Rampage Formula

[asheville67]

I have an ASUS Rampage Formula motherboard. The MOBO has a RAID controller. Can I put 2 Intel X25-V SATA SSDs in a RAID? If so, RAID 0, 1, 5,....? I also read that this will disable TRIM. Is this correct?I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, 8 GB of Crucial Ballistix RAM, and an Intel Q6600. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Rightfuldon]

I have an ASUS Rampage Formula motherboard. The MOBO has a RAID controller. Can I put 2 Intel X25-V SATA SSDs in a RAID? If so, RAID 0, 1, 5,....? I also read that this will disable TRIM. Is this correct?I am running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, 8 GB of Crucial Ballistix RAM, and an Intel Q6600. Any input on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Yes you can put the 2 intel ssds in RAID, although I wouldn't because YES IT DOES DISABLE TRIM. The TRIM command cannot currently pass through raid controllers so you would loose all benefits associated with TRIM.

If you have not purchased the drives yet go for the single Intel x25m 80gb drive rather than the 2 intel x25v drives.

You can still put the drives into RAID if you want to, in which I would recommend RAID 0 if you work with video editing or very large files, you will proabably see a performance increase if you do. RAID 1 if you keep important files on your SSD and want to have a backup drive just incase.

IF YOU DO RAID, make sure to connect your drives to the SATA port controlled by your intel chipset (ICH9R), and have the lastest intel INF files installed as well as the lastest official version of IRST (intel rapid storage technology) drivers installed. This controller is far superior to the JMicron controllers built into your mobo (the speeding HDD ports).

It is also recommended with the Intel SSDs that you have your SATA ports configured to AHCI prior to installation of your OS.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

 

[foscooter]

^+1 Agree.

2 x X25-V = 1 x X25M.

A "V" model is (pretty close to) a "M" model in half: half the size, half the speed. Compare the specs.

Although my rig has 2 x X25-V in RAID 0, I wouldn't recommend it.

1) Loss of TRIM
2) Loss of capacity, in order to "work around" the loss of TRIM.

It is/was recommended to only use 80-85% of the full RAID size, leaving 20-15% unallocated and unformatted, for the drive to use the space to "self-optimize."

Hence, my 80GB RAID drive only uses 64GB of space. This isn't an issue with me, as my OS drive only uses 22+GB of space; Windows 7 Home Premium, Office 2007 Enterprise, Quicken 2010, iTunes 10, Norton Security Suite (from Comcast) are the largest programs installed.

Here is some information overkill: RAID - Wikipedia, ...

BTW: You would want RAID 0 for "speed."

 

[asheville67]

I would like to thank Rightfuldon and foscooter for your detailed replies.

 

[asheville67]

Thank you for the reply. I really appreciate it. I have one more question...this goes out to you and foscooter who replied...why is it that I paid $129 for the WD 150GB Velociraptor and it just seems to not make a difference from a 1TB Caviar Black when it comes to increasing the overall speed of my computer? Every machine I have put an SSD in has increased the overall performance drastically and almost amazingly. I have a Satellite Pro that seemed to crawl...put an SSD in it...and it became lightning fast. What is up with this Velociraptor?

 

[asheville67]

Thank you for the reply. I really appreciate it. I have one more question...this goes out to you and Rightfuldon who replied...why is it that I paid $129 for the WD 150GB Velociraptor and it just seems to not make a difference from a 1TB Caviar Black when it comes to increasing the overall speed of my computer? Every machine I have put an SSD in has increased the overall performance drastically and almost amazingly. I have a Satellite Pro that seemed to crawl...put an SSD in it...and it became lightning fast. What is up with this Velociraptor?

 

[Rightfuldon]

Thank you for the reply. I really appreciate it. I have one more question...this goes out to you and Rightfuldon who replied...why is it that I paid $129 for the WD 150GB Velociraptor and it just seems to not make a difference from a 1TB Caviar Black when it comes to increasing the overall speed of my computer? Every machine I have put an SSD in has increased the overall performance drastically and almost amazingly. I have a Satellite Pro that seemed to crawl...put an SSD in it...and it became lightning fast. What is up with this Velociraptor?

While the velociraptor is a very fast HDD and has comparable performance to the average SSD for random writes and sequenital reads and writes, it has a significantly lower random 4k read speed because it takes a traditional platter HDD a significantly longer time to locate the data on the disk, even though after it finds the data it is able to read it almost as fast.
This small random reads are similar to the majority of activities that most end users will ever use their computers for unless you are constantly transfering and working with massive files (such as video editing etc). It is due to this fact that I believe you feel like you experience a much faster and responsive system when using a SSD rather than a velociraptor, because for the majority of activities you are likely performing on your computer, SSDs are much faster than traditional HDDs where it counts.

Hope this helped!