3 SSD RAID config issue

[ortega10]

I am currently setting up a raid 0 with 3 SSd's(1 80 gb intel, 1 60 gb ocz vertex, 1 30 gb ocz onyx. When i go to set up the raid config in the bios it tells me that the maximum capacity for the three drives in a raid config is around 89 gb total!! What happened to the rest of the storage? if i try to change the value to anything higher it tells me that there is not enough capacity for that much space. Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[sub mesa]

RAID0 requires same-capacity disks; so with those three SSDs you will only be able to use 3 * 30GB = ~90GB; so that appears to be working correctly.

My advice is don't use RAID0 and just use the SSDs as is; that also would give you TRIM capability under Windows 7 if you use Intel or Microsoft AHCI/IDE driver; this is something you can check with AS SSD; it tells you 'msahci' for microsoft and 'iastor' for intel driver; anything else is not TRIM-capable.

 

[ortega10]

Sorry I am not familiar with thisx TRIM capability.

I was just hoping to combine my ssd's because i was trold it increase write/read speeds and I wqant to just have one large drive so I can just run virual box on that one drive and i can boot more than one OS without having to do a dual boot from seperate partitions or seperate SSD's. I really like the idea of having one large drive rather than 3 smaller ones. Ist here any way of getting around this?

 

[ortega10]

Would I be better ofgff running it in JBOD? Just discovered this method and it seems like it could be useful for what i want to do.

 

[sub mesa]

A JBOD would allow you to use all available space, but won't allow TRIM on your SSDs anymore. You can still consider this as an option, but i strongly recommend reading into what TRIM is and why it is useful. Basically, it makes sure the SSDs don't seriously degrade in performance over time.

So it is up you, either use them separate with windows 7 and get TRIM capability, or use JBOD and have the advantage of having one big volume.