Two SSD's in Raid 0, Windows not utilizing them

mgmorrison89

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Jul 3, 2011
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Hello, I recently was lucky enough to get ahold of some SSD's off lease from my work, they are samsung 128g drives and while they arent the fastest around I figured they'd give a nice boost to my build. I set them up in raid 0, formatted and installed windows to them, but not only are the boot times exactly the same as my 1tb 7200rpm seagate, but Windows sees them as a raided disk drive, gives me the option to defrag and maintain them as such, and registers a 5.9 on the WEI. Am I missing something? My drivers are up to date, my system without the drives is as follows

Win7 premium 64
Phenom II x6 1090t
Asus Crosshair Formula IV
16gigs of ram
1TB Seagate baracuda 7200
Radeon 6950

Thanks for any input!
 

firo420

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are the cables your using sata 6gb or 3gb that can make the differance also helps to know whether the ssd is sata 6gb or 3gb, the reason i ask is becuase windows will only give a max 5.9 to a sata 3gb ssd or hdd
 

mgmorrison89

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That's a thought, I'll have to check, my board only has 6gb and Im using the cables that came with it... Just checked, it only came with 3cables, 2 of which are 3g and one 6, that must be my issue!
 

hapkido

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Looking past the WEI (which basically means nothing), do you have drives that can saturate a 3g/s sata port? If not, that's not your issue. Regardless, 3g/s is still way faster than a 7200rpm HDD. Even if you were saturating the port, they still wouldn't be as slow as a traditional HDD as single drives, and especially if the raid was working properly.
 

firo420

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yeah an ssd is enough to saturate a 6gbs port when you compare any ssd preformance from 3gb to 6gb its double the sequential read and write speeds:S so why wouldnt you want to maximise the speed potential?
 

hapkido

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It doesn't work that way. If the drive is not saturating the connection, you won't see a speed increase putting it on a faster connection. If a drive's throughput is less than 3 gbps and it's on a SATA 3 gbps connection, the limiting factor is the component, not the connection. It won't get any faster on a SATA 6 gbps connection.

RAID 0 alternates what drive gets data. Drive 0 may get the odd bits and drive 1 may get the even bits. It can increase speed beyond the connection of any single drive. Let's say you have two drives with 2.5gbps read speed and they're both on 3gbps connections. The read speed in RAID 0 will be more than 3gbps. You don't need SATA 6gbps if each single drive is not faster than 3gbps.

Back to why you shouldn't RAID 0 SSDs... You lose trim support. Trim is important for SSDs.