What is best way 2 install 2 Cr RealSSD C300 64gb drives in raid 0

[Rob306]

What is the best way to install 2 Crucial RealSSD's c300 64gb in Raid 0 on ASUS P6X58D-E MB? Should I use sata 2 or sata 3 ect. I'm attempting to get the best performance out of them by using them in raid 0 with operating system and games. Thanks for any and all help.


My Rig = I7-960-CMPSU-650GX-ASUS P6-X58D-E - 2x MSI GTS 450C 1GD5 in SLI - 2x Crucial 64gb REALSSD C300 - Segate B. 1.5 TB 7200 drive - 6GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 3x 2GB T/C- Corsair-H50 extra fan for p/p - Win 7 64-bit - LG Drive in CM-SC case - Cyborg R.A.T 7 mouse

 

[groberts101]

best performance by far would come from running them off the ICH10R 3G since the Marvell 9128 6G chip is bottlenecked by the PCI-e x1 speed. 64K stripe size should be decent all around.

 

[Rob306]

Best answer selected by Rob306.

 

[Rob306]

Followed your advice, thank you. How does this look ?

It looks good to me and it loads stuff real fast, I'm very happy. My windows experience index went from 5.9 before to 7.2 now. My question is are those results ok as far as the 2 ssd raid 0 set up following what you said above. Again thanks for any and all help.

 

[groberts101]

not too familiar with those drives benchmark numbers but looks a tiny bit low on the write side. You will have to enable write-caching on the array if you didn't already do it yet since it is disabled by default on all Intel raids. You can do it from one of two places shown here.



larger one is the RST raid mgr app and the smaller is the drive properties window in device mgr. Either one supports the same exact setting.

 

[Rob306]

I went to device manager and clicked disk drives selected the raid 0 one which I named volume 0 and it (Enable write caching on device) was checked already, I unchecked it and re-checked it and clicked ok. Not sure the write on those crucial ssd's is too good. Got them at a micro center and one was open box priced at $75 the other was brand new at $119 thats why I got them.

 

[groberts101]

couple of things.

first off, I'm not sure of the cleaning process with those controllers but most are going to be reset to clean factory performance by secure erasing them first. Probably should have done that on the used one since it was surely tested and possibly quite dirty. This could affect performance especially if it drags the other drive down like R0 can do at times.

second thing is that you came very close to enabling caching but missed it by one little step there. The box is marked as active by default?.. yes it is... BUT.. it is NOT active on raid arrays despite that checked box. If you have that RST raid mgr app it will show you the true state of caching regardless of what Windows tells you.

In order to activate it you must uncheck the box>THEN click ok> recheck and click ok once more to activate it. Simply unchecking/rechecking without clicking OK in between will not allow the setting to take hold.

And yes, those smaller drives are weak on the write side.

 

[Rob306]

Ahhh probably what it is. Didnt secure erase them and didn't click ok in between unchecking and re-checking. Thanks for all your help.