Setting up existing SSD in Raid 0

themrmxyzptlk

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Sep 5, 2013
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Hello, so I have an existing SSD that I used for my boot drive (Samsung EVO 120GB) and I'm wondering how I can add another SSD to put in Raid 0 with the one I already use? I've found some guides that are helpful but they all deal with setting up a brand new array and don't go into what I should do if I'm already using one of the drives.

I'm running Windows 7 64bit on an Asus Sabertooth 990fx Motherboard. I have plenty of back up drives to back up my data as well.

If you guys have any knowledge or know of solid tutorials it will really help!

Thanks.
 
If you are already using one, you start all over so the guides you have will serve you well.

However.... I built a box about 18 months ago with:

(2) 256 GB Samsung Pro SSHDs in RAID 0
(2) 2 TB Seagate SSHDs in RAID 1

After three months of usage, I broke both arrays ... now I have

SSD 1 with OS and work programs (AutoCAD, Adobe, engineering and mapping programs, Office Suite
SSD 2 with back up OS and Games

SSHD Data / Games
SSHD 2 Backups

RAID 0 was totally useless, offered no speed advantage in usage and was often a PITA. I replaced the mirrored set with a backup program that was free and runs in the background. After contacting Samsung several times with the question of where's the benefit, their answer was "there is none, we do not recommend RAID on our drives".

Here's a THG post that is about 8 years old .... nothing's changed, other than I'd guess many of the links are now dead.

=====================================================

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_0#RAID_0

RAID 0 is useful for setups such as large read-only NFS servers where mounting many disks is time-consuming or impossible and redundancy is irrelevant.

RAID 0 is also used in some gaming systems where performance is desired and data integrity is not very important. However, real-world tests with games have shown that RAID-0 performance gains are minimal, although some desktop applications will benefit.[1][2]


http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2101
"We were hoping to see some sort of performance increase in the game loading tests, but the RAID array didn't give us that. While the scores put the RAID-0 array slightly slower than the single drive Raptor II, you should also remember that these scores are timed by hand and thus, we're dealing within normal variations in the "benchmark".

Our Unreal Tournament 2004 test uses the full version of the game and leaves all settings on defaults. After launching the game, we select Instant Action from the menu, choose Assault mode and select the Robot Factory level. The stop watch timer is started right after the Play button is clicked, and stopped when the loading screen disappears. The test is repeated three times with the final score reported being an average of the three. In order to avoid the effects of caching, we reboot between runs. All times are reported in seconds; lower scores, obviously, being better. In Unreal Tournament, we're left with exactly no performance improvement, thanks to RAID-0

If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

Bottom line: RAID-0 arrays will win you just about any benchmark, but they'll deliver virtually nothing more than that for real world desktop performance. That's just the cold hard truth."


http://www.techwarelabs.com/articles/hardware/raid-and-gaming/index_6.shtml
".....we did not see an increase in FPS through its use. Load times for levels and games was significantly reduced utilizing the Raid controller and array. As we stated we do not expect that the majority of gamers are willing to purchase greater than 4 drives and a controller for this kind of setup. While onboard Raid is an option available to many users you should be aware that using onboard Raid will mean the consumption of CPU time for this task and thus a reduction in performance that may actually lead to worse FPS. An add-on controller will always be the best option until they integrate discreet Raid controllers with their own memory into consumer level motherboards."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1001325
"However, many have tried to justify/overlook those shortcomings by simply saying "It's faster." Anyone who does this is wrong, wasting their money, and buying into hype. Nothing more."

http://jeff-sue.suite101.com/how-raid-storage-improves-performance-a101975
"The real-world performance benefits possible in a single-user PC situation is not a given for most people, because the benefits rely on multiple independent, simultaneous requests. One person running most desktop applications may not see a big payback in performance because they are not written to do asynchronous I/O to disks. Understanding this can help avoid disappointment."

http://www.scs-myung.com/v2/index. [...] om_content
"What about performance? This, we suspect, is the primary reason why so many users doggedly pursue the RAID 0 "holy grail." This inevitably leads to dissapointment by those that notice little or no performance gain.....As stated above, first person shooters rarely benefit from RAID 0.__ Frame rates will almost certainly not improve, as they are determined by your video card and processor above all else. In fact, theoretically your FPS frame rate may decrease, since many low-cost RAID controllers (anything made by Highpoint at the tiem of this writing, and most cards from Promise) implement RAID in software, so the process of splitting and combining data across your drives is done by your CPU, which could better be utilized by your game. That said, the CPU overhead of RAID0 is minimal on high-performance processors."

Even the HD manufacturers limit RAID's advantages to very specific applications and non of them involves gaming:

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/http://westerndigital.com/en/products/raid/
 


SSD + RAID 0. Read this all the way through before you go down that road:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html
 
If you really wanted to do it:

Clone the existing drive to another drive. (Clonezilla, Acronis Trueimage, etc)

Wipe the SSD, add the second, follow the guides you have for setting up RAID.

Use the clone image and write to the RAID array.

I've had my OCZ Vertex 4 in raid for nearly 3 years now with no issues. At the time I bought them I wanted a 512GB SSD, but prices for those were about $600, got the Vertex for 205 a piece.

 


So basically there's no real world benefit to RAID 0? If I wanted more space (not necessarily more speed) should I just get a bigger drive and clone all my data?
 


So it looks like RAID isn't the best option for me, but if I wanted to have more space on my boot drive, would cloning all the data to a bigger drive be relatively easy? Haven't had much experience cloning.

Thanks.
 


Don't even have to do that. Assuming this is a desktop, just add another drive, of whatever capacity your budget allows. It will be just another drive letter, to use as needed.
 
Boot drive size depends completely on what you keep on it. My current drive (120GB SSD) is coming up on 3 years old. ~75GB used space and holding.

The OS and applications don't really consume a lot of space. Games, music, video...that's what sucks up your drive space.

Music/Video/Docs/Downloads...all easily redirected to other drives.
See this:
Win 7 & 8: http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1834397/ssd-redirecting-static-files.html
Win 8.1: http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2024314/windows-redirecting-folders-drives.html
 


I'm also about 3 years old and about 82 GB atm ..... a lil bigger at the moment as AutoCAD 2016 decided to install itself on C:\ despite my specific direction to the contrary....waiting for backup to finish before rebooting and uninstalling Companies like AutoCAD, Adobe etc who have a suite of interrelated programs like to install "common files" to C:\ no matter where the program actually resides.

The other think to watch out for is emails, saved games and other stuff which often defaults to user file folder on C:\
 


Yea i have a 120 as well but I have downloaded a ton of apps so I like have only 10%-15% left. Adding another drive would I guess help but then I just have a drive that's sitting there. I have two 1tb internal drives that act as storage as well as backup and another 4tb drive that is a strict back up. My problem is that my boot drive (the ssd) is basically out of space. My original plan was to raid another 120GB drive and that would take care of the space issue and get some faster speeds, but it sounds like it's not worth it to do that.

I'll prolly just end up getting a bigger drive and replace the 120gb. Thanks for your help.