RevoDrive3 as 1st boot?

[solidbrick]

I plugged in OCZ's RevoDrive3 (120 Gb) SSD in my ASUS P8Z68 mobo. I intend to use it as a bootable drive for OS and programs only.
OCZ's small manual wants me to make this SSD as primary bootable, if I understood them well.
Now I learned some time ago always to make an optical drive, in earlier days a floppy-drive, 1st bootable.
Otherwise you could never use a bootable CD.
Does OCZ wants me to go into BIOS and change the boot order every time I like to boot up from a CD or USB device? No problem so far, but why? Is it in the nature of not being a spin drive perhaps?

 

[alyoshka]

No, it's the nature of booting from a PCIe slot.
And you learnt wrong, the boot order is always the primary HDD first and the rest are disabled. Only during the OS installation should the Boot order have the Installation Medium ie ODD,FDD,USB set to primary. For then after it should be reset to the Primary HDD as the first boot option, this also helps in saving you from any boot viruses if they are on a CD or DVD or USB drive that may be inside or plugged in during a boot.

 

[solidbrick]

This is a very good answer alyoshka! Thanks.
Also I will change the boot-order in the pc I am working and replying on now.
It would not be the first time I booted up with a CD still in a port.
Up till now the system skipped the CD and nothing went wrong, but times are changing very fast to our disadvantage.

What are your thoughts about SRT and making 20 or 30 Gb free on this SSDrive, instead of using raid 0 on two HHD's? Or using a second small SSD in SRT for that matter. I am not a gamer, I use the pc as a (small) workstation. The pc does some heavy calculations which take sometimes more than 3 hours. I want to lower this drastically in near future.
I am seeing the end of my budget or I have to print my own money, which will make the Euro even more suspected.

 

[alyoshka]

SRT---- Smart Response Technology. This is a tech which is actually pretty old just a new name, readyboost, caching etc etc are just a few of it's old names.
Since quite a few of us are already using SSDs for our OS and applications the difference is going to be minimal. SRT is for those people who want SSD like performance from a standard HDD. I wouldn't go into using my SSD by dedicating 20 to 30GB on the drive for SRT since it's going to add to reducing the life of my SSD faster.
We all disabled SSD caching as a mandatory rule, why was that done? mainly so as to reduce the read/writes taking place, now what the companies have done is, they are making you add another smaller SSD for those very same read/writes that they told us to switch off first. Either way, the life of either of the SSDs is going to go down due to the massive read/writes taking place.
RAID 0 on the other hand, is not everyone's cup of coffee, if you like it and can live with it's complications, go ahead, if you don't stay away.

In your case, you could buy yourself a Smaller SSD to use the SRT feature, but a Revo is way faster than anything else you'll every come across in that budget, you really don't need any of the other stuff.
But you do need to keep 20 to 25 GB free on the drive to make it function well.

 

[gnomio]

Theres no complications with raid-0. Doing intensive work such as video file editing, graphical design, CAD/CAM, and the like should consider a RAID array. RAID 0 will provide the improved performance needed in many of these applications. (RAID 10 is superior due to its redundancy, but the requirement for four drives makes it expensive and space-consuming; if the RAID 0 array is backed up each night then that's usually quite acceptable for a workstation.)
OP heres a performance chart with a workstation load
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-raid-matrix-charts/I-O-Performance-Workstation,229.html

SSD's frag very quickly once they fill up. And OP I think you will know how quickly a workstation can do that. Once a SSD fill up past 70 percent its perfomance start to degrade massively where you end up with a drive slower than a mechanical

 

[solidbrick]

Thanks alyoshka.
I think I will skip SRT at all.
The Revo3 has 120 Gb space according to OCZ.
But management says about 111 Gb (except 100 Mb for the system)! Is that normal??
My WD Hard Disk says 1 Tb and is 931 Gb in reality by the way.
Another reason to be careful with space in SSD. With Windows and without any other program I am left with 90 Gb.

Also making Revo3 active in the system is not an easy job. OCZ should say to pick the 64 file out of the list in their little manual. It took me some time to find out.

I worked with onboard raid 0 in my old configuration and it gave no problem. Perhaps I will use a raid controller card now, but you don't hear a lot of them nowadays. The onboard raid controller seems to be as good.

Monitor is on the board for the moment. I will decide on a video-card later on.

 

[solidbrick]

Thanks gnomio,
But with all respect, the question was about onboard raid vs raid controller card.
And my suspicion that cards were fased out because of the tests being all about 3 years old, and perhaps the onboard raid getting better over the years.
Together with the question if it was an advantage for the cards to have their own CPU.

 

[alyoshka]

Yes, this is normal for all SSDs. A certain amount of space is always reserved in a SSD to help extend the life. Usually a manufacturer says 128GB SSD but it has 150GB of actual space but the rest or extra is not usable by us, it's for lets call it wear and tear, as the usage goes on, dead cells withing the SSD or blocks are automatically assigned to the unseen extra space that is provided.

You're lucky, I'm using an Intel Second Gen SSD 80Gb, usable is 74.5Gb. With all my programs installed and the OS I'm left with 24Gb free. That is something I keep my eye on all the time.
Yup working with the Revo is a new learning experience altogether. The Revo itself has a RAID if I'm not wrong...

 

[solidbrick]

Thanks alyoshka.
Q and A are crossing and overlapping each other, never mind. I thought it was my fault about the missing 9 Gb. I can live with it now. Europe here, and 08:46.
Nighttime for you perhaps?

 

[alyoshka]

Nah, it's 1 in the PM here...... wide awake and kicking...