SSD RAID 0 Question

[xkillahmindx]

Hello everyone!
Well at the moment i have a OCZ Agility 2, and pccasegear are having a promotion for vertex 2. I was wondering if its possible that i RAID 0 these 2 SSD's. they are practically identical xept for the ROP of something. thanks

 

[geofelt]

I suspect that you can.

Are the capacities similar?

But, you will have to give up trim support which will cause performance problems with deletes and reuse of space.

You will get a nice single image.

In general, your benchmarks will shine, but you will notice no change in performance.

I suggest you use the second drive without raid.

 

[xkillahmindx]

Umm, sorry for asking but, what do u mean i have to give up TRIM support. i know i have it enabled atm, but i dont know what exactly that is.
the capacities are exactly the same. im pretty sure everything bout the 2 drivers are exactly the same except for the ROP.

 

[geofelt]

What is the ROP?

If you now have trim suppport, you are using the native windows 7 drivers.

If you change to raid-0, you will get the Intel raid drivers. Currently, the intel drivers do not pass the trim command to the raid array.

The purpose of the trim command is to let the drive know that a deleted space is available without having to go through a read/rewrite operation to the underlying nand chip.

 

[xkillahmindx]

oh okay, well, lets say if i were to RAID-0 them, would i expect aprrox twice the performance or like just a bit over usual

 

[4745454b]

I believe for most operations you should see close to twice the speed, assuming they are hooked up to SATAII channels. This will go down over time if you can't use TRIM. Also keep in mind that you won't see your load times cut in half as there are other things going on then just reading data off a harddrive.

 

[geofelt]

oh okay, well, lets say if i were to RAID-0 them, would i expect aprrox twice the performance or like just a bit over usual

For what it is worth:

I once had two X25-M 80gb drives in raid-0.
Synthetic benchmarks were impressive.

I changed to a single 160gb X25-M drive and noticed, equal performance. If anything, it was a bit better.
Synthetic benchmarks were not as good.

 

[xkillahmindx]

oh okay, thanks guy. ill just keep my current SSD and not buy a new one. since there is no practical need.

 

[xkillahmindx]

Best answer selected by xkillahmindx.

 

[4745454b]

Keep in mind Geo that the larger the drive, the more access channels will be used. If your 160GB used twice as many channels as a single 80GB, then they would be more or less equal in tests? At least as I understand the tech.

 

[geofelt]

Keep in mind Geo that the larger the drive, the more access channels will be used. If your 160GB used twice as many channels as a single 80GB, then they would be more or less equal in tests? At least as I understand the tech.

That is my understanding also. However, the sequential transfer rate for 160gb was not close to twice the rate of the 80gb drives. I think there must be more to it than that.

 

[jockey]

My understanding of SDD's is that they write slow, but read fast. Therefor, they are best used for OS's and preferred program drives. I don't know of them being used as file transfer/ deletes drives. Unless you have a huge income, and no bad habits...