RAID 0 with Dual SSD's

[deadsearolls]

So I am going to start experimenting with RAID. I have 0 experience and need a few answers to a few things.
Now I already have a 120gb OCZ Vertex 4 and I plan on buying another to run in RAID 0. Now heres what I need to know in a numbered list format.

1. Is RAID 0 with Dual SSD's worth it? I do a heavy ammount of gaming and load times are a big thing for me. I am completely aware that running in RAID will destroy your saved data if any of the drives become corrupted.

2. Should I buy the same SSD for raid? Does RAID work like SLI where the more powerful card will scale itself down to match with the other? ex. Buying a HyperX 3k 120gb and attempting to use that.

3. How is RAID setup? I understand that it is common for newer motherboards to have built in RAID controllers. I am also wondering how to setup RAID in a sense that I already have my OS and games etc on the 120gb. So if I were to setup RAID, would I have to format my 120gb SSD and start over or will RAID automatically portion out my data to accomodate the new drive.

If you guys know any guides, tutorials or just any general knowledge on RAID it would be greatly appreciated.
If anyone is confused by what I am asking please say so and I will attempt to straighten it out! Thanks!
FIRST POST BTW

Specs:
Mobo: ASUS Sabertooth Z77
CPU: i7 2600 (not K)
GPU: Dual GTX 670 in SLI
PSU: OCZ 1250w
Windows 7 OS

Blah Blah Blah peripherials I dont feel like listing ETC...

 

[Dereck47]

1. Is RAID 0 with Dual SSD's worth it? I do a heavy ammount of gaming and load times are a big thing for me. I am completely aware that running in RAID will destroy your saved data if any of the drives become corrupted.

If your SSDs are 64GB and less then it's probably worth it just to have one large logical volume. There would probably be a noticeable difference in performance also.

With 2 120GB SATA 6Gb/s SSDs in RAID-0 I doubt you'll notice any real-world performance difference than just connecting them as separate drives C: and D:

2. Should I buy the same SSD for raid? Does RAID work like SLI where the more powerful card will scale itself down to match with the other? ex. Buying a HyperX 3k 120gb and attempting to use that.

Correct. A RAID array's Read/Write performance is based upon the drive in the array with the slowest Read/Write speeds. So identical drives in an array will give best performance. That being said, I doubt there'll be any noticeable difference with a HyperX 3K and a Vertex 4 in RAID-0.

3. How is RAID setup? I understand that it is common for newer motherboards to have built in RAID controllers. I am also wondering how to setup RAID in a sense that I already have my OS and games etc on the 120gb. So if I were to setup RAID, would I have to format my 120gb SSD and start over or will RAID automatically portion out my data to accomodate the new drive.

When you create a RAID-0 array all data on all drives in the array is deleted during the process. So you'll have to do a fresh install after you create the array.
No need to manually format the drives; Windows will do it automatically during the installation process.

Connect your SSDs to the Intel 6Gb/s ports (not the ASMedia 6Gb/s ports), boot into BIOS and change the SATA mode of the ports to RAID mode.
Save your BIOS settings, reboot into RAID BIOS, and create your RAID-0 array.
Save your RAID BIOS settings, reboot to the optical drive that has your Windows disk and install Windows.

 

[toarranre]

I was looking to do a similar thing, I want about 120 GB of ssd storage for OS and a few frequently used programes/files.
What I am looking at is buying two of these;

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-mSATA-Internal-Solid-CT064M4SSD3/dp/B008393M2S/ref=sr_1_9?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1360904406&sr=1-9&keywords=ssd+64+gb

To get a similar spec to one of these

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-RevoDrive-Express-Solid-State/dp/B005F30IYU/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1360917279&sr=1-2&keywords=ssd+128gb+pci+e

for half the price.

Is there a bottle neck in the raid system, could I use built in raid or would I need a pci e raid controller?

 

[deadsearolls]

First, thank you dereck47 for answering all my questions and to toarranre I think what your looking at is still overpriced.

SSD's have come quite far down in price recently almost to a point where most of the ones ive seen are less than 1$ a gig.
Now the dual Crucials are fine if you want a PCI SSD and I suggest going with it but its not that great of a deal.
I dont really know much about PCI SSD's and looking at the amazon prices im kinda blown away by the prices.
I did some research and all I could see was that PCI offers a greater throughput, but is SATA 3.0 that far behind?

If I were you I would buy this http://amzn.to/11LFbvT unless you HAVE to go with the PCI SSD.

 

[e56imfg]

Any reason why you're trying RAID? Unless you need a single volume, RAIDing SSDs has almost no noticeable performance benefit and it really only shows in benchmarks. Not to mention RAIDing SSDs is just a big pain.

If you do go the RAID way, remember to install the newest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver so that TRIM is enabled.

 

[toarranre]

First, thank you dereck47 for answering all my questions and to toarranre I think what your looking at is still overpriced.

SSD's have come quite far down in price recently almost to a point where most of the ones ive seen are less than 1$ a gig.
Now the dual Crucials are fine if you want a PCI SSD and I suggest going with it but its not that great of a deal.
I dont really know much about PCI SSD's and looking at the amazon prices im kinda blown away by the prices.
I did some research and all I could see was that PCI offers a greater throughput, but is SATA 3.0 that far behind?

If I were you I would buy this http://amzn.to/11LFbvT unless you HAVE to go with the PCI SSD.

Limit is 6Gb (about 750MB per second for sata, pci e 2.0 is 16GB (if you have a 32 channel slot)

Any way that pci drive I Linked to was only 500 MB/s, so no real gain over a sata drive.

Its still expensive when you look at cost per GB storage but I'm looking at it as a middle ground between storage and ram so price per transfer rate is important too.

@ e56imfg

Using raid to (theoretically) get the speed of a single $300 drive from two $75 drives.

If theres no percievable difference using raid is there a real difference going from a slower to faster drive then? (eg. 500MB/s - 1GB/s)

My thoughts on it were that RAM speeds dont make a huge difference, but the hard drive is handling much more volume so I thought increasing speed/using RAID might.

I'm probably just being silly, I usually start having silly ideas after seeing lunatics like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xF3RYirmWI

 

[e56imfg]

Limit is 6Gb (about 750MB per second for sata, pci e 2.0 is 16GB (if you have a 32 channel slot)

Any way that pci drive I Linked to was only 500 MB/s, so no real gain over a sata drive.

Its still expensive when you look at cost per GB storage but I'm looking at it as a middle ground between storage and ram so price per transfer rate is important too.

@ e56imfg

Using raid to (theoretically) get the speed of a single $300 drive from two $75 drives.

If theres no percievable difference using raid is there a real difference going from a slower to faster drive then? (eg. 500MB/s - 1GB/s)

My thoughts on it were that RAM speeds dont make a huge difference, but the hard drive is handling much more volume so I thought increasing speed/using RAID might.

I'm probably just being silly, I usually start having silly ideas after seeing lunatics like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xF3RYirmWI

Unless you do synthetic benchmarks for a living, you won't notice any real world benefit. It only helps seq's.
4k's and acc times are the same whether you're RAIDing or not.

You do realize that the fastest SSD only goes up to 550/450 average? If you RAID two 32GB or 60GB SSDs, you'll still be stuck with the slower 4k's and acc times.

SOO, you probably won't notice 1Gb/s seq.

Don't compare RAM with hard drives dude, they do completely different tasks.

Just don't start buying extremely cheap SSDs. Some dirt cheap SSDs are slower than HDDs.

 

[toarranre]

Unless you do synthetic benchmarks for a living, you won't notice any real world benefit. It only helps seq's.
4k's and acc times are the same whether you're RAIDing or not.

Ah, seems alot less worth it now, cheers.

You do realize that the fastest SSD only goes up to 550/450 average?

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-revodrive-3-x2-pci-express-ssd.html

Cheap? no. Faster than sata? yes.

Don't compare RAM with hard drives dude, they do completely different tasks

Fair enough, I'm looking at using it as very frequently accessed storage then.

AAAnyway, I'm getting off topic. Thanks for the advice, probably saved me a heap of fruitless aggravation!

Oh and back to the original question, if you have 2 SSDs what about putting games on one and OS on another so that when your playing the computer will be accessing the two different drives seperately any way? Would this make a difference?

 

[erpsaa]

Any reason why you're trying RAID? Unless you need a single volume, RAIDing SSDs has almost no noticeable performance benefit and it really only shows in benchmarks. Not to mention RAIDing SSDs is just a big pain.

If you do go the RAID way, remember to install the newest Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver so that TRIM is enabled.

e56imfg,

I am curious, when you say "RAIDing SSDs has almost no noticeable performance benefit and it really only shows in benchmarks?"

Are your comments specific to a 2 SSD BIOS/Software RAID setup, or general to any configuration and any setup with SSDs?

I ask because I have been working with HW RAID a long time and SSD's are common in data warehousing these days. A good example, is a company deployed a 2042G-TRF/6RF 2U QUAD Opteron Server, (Supermicro Mainboard) with an AMD Opteron 6172 (48 cores total), 256GB ECC RAM and 1 + 1 1,400 Wt PSUs.

The storage controllers (6 LSI 9200-8e’s) are the model above the one I use in my main WS, (an LSI MegaRAID RT3WB080) except he deployed 6 cards, with 30 OCZ 120GB SATA3 SSD’s due to the deviation from linear scalability after five disks. The final implementation was RAID 1E (Oracle) similar to RAID10, for a data warehouse and delivered >13,000MB/Second of IOMeter throughput for sequential reads. My scaling is less I get about 2.2GB/s, (that's why I am trying to move to a PCIe3 x8 HW RAID Card), but I assure you it is not simply a benchmark thing. The speed carries over to one Virtual Machine as well and has sped up the time it takes me to do an ERP data Migration tenfold.

However, you and I would be in complete agreement on BIOS RAID with 2 disks, if that is what you're saying and yes, that is a REAL pain in the neck with SSD's or HDDs. Backup and restore for one thing, requires an Enterprise Application that is licensed to work with WAIK and install drivers prior to creating a backup boot disk. It seems Microsoft has removed the licensing ability from consumer backup programs to create a functional WinPE disk that can read at the block level, size, understand the file system and DUGH, actually SEE the Virtual Drive.

 

[deadsearolls]

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