Windows 7 - SSD - RAID reinstall question

[nikoli707]

So im a noob at all this but i realized i installed my windows 7 the other week on m y new build as ide, instead of ahci or raid. gigabyte Z68 2500k 120gb ocz agility3 is my setup so i obviously should be taking advantage of raid so I'm gonna have to reinstall which is no biggie.

Ive found a pretty complete guide on overclock.net and other places as well but my main question is what raid should i pick if i only have the single ssd as a drive right now? Raid 0 or raid 1? The ocz agility 3 supports trim. Do i want trim? Can anyone point me to some guides to these modern ssd's?

My pc is just for media and gaming and i have a external usb hdd that i regularly back up my precious files, so I'm mostly concerned with getting the maximum performance rather than protection.

Thanks.

 

[mcnumpty23]

you dont have to reinstall

what do you mean raid?

you need more than one hard drive for raid

heres how to change from ide to ahci with windows installed

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313676

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

Umm you cannot RAID with one drive....

All the best Brett

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

And TRIM has nothing to do with raid...

All the best Brett

 

[dechy]

For one, you can't do RAID with your current setup; you need more than a single disk.

Two, no SSD supports TRIM over RAID yet, and I personally wouldn't give up TRIM for RAID.

Sadly, you should of installed as AHCI to get full benefits of NCQ and other nifty technologies. Don't go switching it on the fly, not a good idea unless you get the exact steps (need to reinstall).

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi nikoli707

If you have a laptop then usually there is only room for one disk (hard disk or ssd)

you can only create a SSD RAID with 2 or more SSD

If you have a desktop and room for 2 SSD's you would be better off not using RAID unless you want redundancy / data security using a RAID mirror disk

You should change bios setting for SATA controller to AHCI to properly support SSD

It may well be possible to get Windows 7 to recognise change and after a reboot or two carry on working without re installing.
(Back up any important data first)

Windows 7 should have turned trim on (if not turn it on),
Googling will show many guides to configuring Windows 7 to make most of SDD

I recently replaced a Western Digital 10k rpm 80 GB hard disk for the same SSD you chose.
[this disk has Windows XP and Windows 7 partitions, I have a second hard disk for storing data]

Windows XP & 7 start 3 times faster than before so you do not need RAID for extra speed

regards
Mike Barnes

 

[Ironwilly]

In order to enable AHCI to get the most of your SATA controller you will have to reinstall windows 7. Raid is for improving the performance and/or reliability of your drives when using two or more of the same spec hard drives. In your case, it sounds like you have a single SSD, so raid wouldn't apply to your SSD.

TRIM is essentially your operating system telling your hard drive which pieces of information are no longer being used, and can therefore be wiped clean. This allows the drive to perform consistently over its lifespan. You'll want to enable this feature and disable any defrag software for your SSD.

In regards to guides for SSDs, http://thessdreview.com/ has a lot of good info. What specifically are you trying to learn?

Edit: Evidently mcnumpty23 posted a guide to enabling AHCI without reinstalling windows. Make sure you perform the steps in order, do not enable AHCI before making the registry entries or Windows will not boot. I haven't tried this method, but if it saves you some time.... great!!!

 

[sewalk]

RAID = Redundant Array of Independent DriveS.

A quick look at something as generalized as Wikipedia's entry for RAID will probably be pretty educational.

As far as SSD specifics, yes, you absolutely want TRIM support unless you want to shorten the lifespan of your SSD. If you think you want to get a second SSD and put them together in RAID0, let me try to dissuade you from that now. Currently, TRIM for SSDs is not supported in RAID. Even when it is at some later date, that's a lot of money spent for something you'd honestly hardly notice in general PC usage or gaming.

Benchmarks may show tremendous performance for SSDs in RAID but out in the real world, humans don't recognize advantages that average out to a few milliseconds per operation. For instance, if your computer loads a raid instance in World of Warcraft 0.5 seconds faster than it did before, you're still going to be waiting for the other 24 people in your raid group to catch up.

Spend the money on a better GFX card, motherboard, RAM or CPU.

 

[nikoli707]

The guide i was looking at was this: http://www.overclock.net/t/1156654/seans-windows-7-install-optimization-guide-for-ssds-hdds

I will just enable ahci in the bios and reinstall. I dont have much expect some benchmarking programs and firefox so i will just back up the install files and start over. Im also having some issues with my gpu im trying to figure out so a reinstall can help me narrow that down as well.

 

[eXistenZ]

Perhaps the reference to RAID regards the Intel Smart Response Technology, viz., SSD caching of HDD in the Z68 chipset.

 

[nikoli707]

Best answer selected by nikoli707.