Have you done RAID 0 with SSD's?

[teko_philby]

Have you done RAID 0 with SSD's and do you think it is worthwhile?

There are many do's and don'ts... want to hear opinions from people who have done it.

 

[buzznut]

Have you done RAID 0 with SSD's and do you think it is worthwhile?

There are many do's and don'ts... want to hear opinions from people who have done it.

Depends on what you want. Raid 0 would increase speed, but would probably result in less reliability and increase in hassle while at the same time disabling trim function. Over time this will cause problems with performance, which is the reason you want to raid 0 in the first place. So to me that is counter-productive to what you're trying to accomplish.

Some other folks say they reinstall their OS every six months anyway and basically set their SSDs to near-original performance and aren't worried about degradation. They therefore aren't worried about losing trim function in raid.

But you already have my opinion, it isn't worth it to me. However if all your concerned with is having the fastest machine right now, then go for it.

 

[chesteracorgi]

I saw a video of a massively RAIDed collection of SSDs and was impressed, but the practical application is dubious. SSDs are the only hardware that can currently use the 6.0 GBps transfer rate and the advantage of RAID in HDDs is that you have two spinning mechanical devices that increase the overall speed by reading stripes. The advantage of RAIDing SSDs is dubious because the limitation is in the bus transfer. If you have an effective read tranfer of 4 GBps the increased read speed is limited to their individual reads and, while you may incrementally may increase the speed, the trade off is both expense and the fact that switching between two SSDs does not increase their individual access speed. RAIDing two HDDs with 100 MBps speed will be an increase from 1.0 to 1.7 times the HDD speed of a single drive. But RAIDing two SSDs will only get an increase of 1.0 to 1.05 or maybe 1.10. The limit on SDDs is that they are static RAM devices and the access speed is limited by the speed of the RAM. Unless you can somehow buffer the read/write speed through some buffer (and that buffer has to be in RAM) you are limited to the speed of the RAM,

 

[larkspur]

Have you done RAID 0 with SSD's and do you think it is worthwhile?

There are many do's and don'ts... want to hear opinions from people who have done it.

I run 3 SSDs. They are all OCZ Vertex 2 50gb (the 34nm version). One is my Win 7 OS drive all by itself. Win 7 recognized it was an SSD during installation and so installation was easy. It supports TRIM in Win 7 and I definitely have significantly quicker boot-ups and shutdowns and my updates are very snappy. I don't use a page file.

The other two are doing ICH10 chipset RAID 0. I didn't expect much from chipset RAID 0 but just like Tom's reported in the SSD RAID scaling article awhile back , when I compare benchmarks, the RAID-0 performs almost twice as fast as the single drive. In real-world all I can say is that it is much faster than any raid-0 (true hardware or chipset) that I ever ran with HDDs. It is satisfying to say the least. While my 100gb is pretty tiny, I use it exclusively for high-demand content while using a RAID-1 with spinners for everything else. I think it is definitely worth it but I've never had any issues or had reason to update the firmware. They all worked great out of the box.

People will argue that TRIM is not supported in RAID. This is true (unless I missed a recent development). The WRITE speeds should go down once that thing gets filled. All I can say is that I haven't noticed any slow-down in the real-world and I've filled-up and dumped those drives many times. I ran a benchmark a year after getting them and noticed tiny decreases and even some increases in their scores. If you continue to lament about no TRIM on RAID then you can always use a utility to fully erase your SSDs - this will restore their write speed to spec. I think the scalability makes it worth it for certain enthusiasts.

 

[larkspur]

The advantage of RAIDing SSDs is dubious because the limitation is in the bus transfer. If you have an effective read tranfer of 4 GBps the increased read speed is limited to their individual reads and, while you may incrementally may increase the speed, the trade off is both expense and the fact that switching between two SSDs does not increase their individual access speed. RAIDing two HDDs with 100 MBps speed will be an increase from 1.0 to 1.7 times the HDD speed of a single drive. But RAIDing two SSDs will only get an increase of 1.0 to 1.05 or maybe 1.10. The limit on SDDs is that they are static RAM devices and the access speed is limited by the speed of the RAM. Unless you can somehow buffer the read/write speed through some buffer (and that buffer has to be in RAM) you are limited to the speed of the RAM,

Yikes. You need to read this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-iops,2848.html