Raid 0 SSD setup for amateur

[bms85]

I've purchased parts for a I7-2700k rig. I'm planning on running raid 0 across two Kingston HyperX 120gb drives. Unfortunately I don't know the first thing about raid or SSDs and I've heard raid 0 can be much more difficult with SSDs than with standard HDDs.

Does anyone have any advice/articles/tutorials I should take into account?

 

[Dereck47]

I've heard raid 0 can be much more difficult with SSDs than with standard HDDs.

Not true. You go through the same steps in BIOS regardless of whether your drives are SSD or HDD.

The only difference is which ports you connect your drives to.

With HDDs you can connect 2 drives in RAID to SATA 6Gb/s ports or SATA 3Gb/s ports, and it will not matter, your performance will be the same either way.

With your Kingston HyperX drives you need to connect them to SATA 6Gb/s ports for maximum performance. They will work connected to SATA 3Gb/s ports, but at reduced speed.

Read your motherboard manual for instructions on setting up a RAID array.

What make and model motherboard do you have?

 

[bms85]

Thanks, your reply has eased a bit of my anxiety about botching the raid setup. Most of the info i'm finding with my typical Google search methods are bringing up severely dated results (2008-2009). t seems they were fighting with controllers pretty bad back then.

My motherboard is a ASRock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3, it can be seen here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157269

 

[Dereck47]

Your SSDs should be connected to ports SATA3_0 & SATA3_1 (page 13 of your motherboard manual) for maximum performance.

Here's the link for your RAID Installation Guide and motherboard User Manual:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/manual.asp?Model=Z68 Extreme7 Gen3

 

[bms85]

Ok will do, Thanks for your help!

 

[mwrather]

Your SSDs should be connected to ports SATA3_0 & SATA3_1 (page 13 of your motherboard manual) for maximum performance.

Here's the link for your RAID Installation Guide and motherboard User Manual:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/manual.asp?Model=Z68 Extreme7 Gen3

Hey, also new to this w/ a related question. When looking at the specs for a motherboard, how do I parse the SATA RAID entry? For instance, the entry for the motherboard linked to above is:

2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s and 4 x SATA2 3.0 Gb/s support RAID (0, 1, 5, 10) by Z68

Does this mean that you can configure two 6.0Gb/s drives into an array and do the same with 4 drives with 3Gb/s connections?

In the machine I'm putting together I was looking at this mb:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131801

and I want to make sure that I will be able to configure two SSD drives in a RAID 0 array with 6Gb/s connections.

Thanks!

 

[bms85]

I'm no expert but I found "2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), brown and 4 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s), black support RAID 0, 1, 5, 10" listed under raid on the details tab.

I'm pretty sure it supports two drives in raid 0 at 6mb/s.