Setting up RAID0 on new SSDs

[scotthew]

I picked up two OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSDs from Newegg's Cyber Monday sale, and I'm having trouble setting up a RAID for a new Win7 install.

I have an ASUS P6X58D Premium mobo and the Storage Configuration is set to RAID in the BIOS, but the SSDs are still flagged as IDE. I'm assuming this is why they aren't showing in the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. How do I proceed?

A related question: I've read the Marvell RAID controller isn't so great with high speed drives and SATA 6. Can I use Intel's RST RAID drivers instead?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ichy]

Read your bios carefully, it will say something like if sata ports 1-4 are set to raid, then ports 5 and 6 can only be IDE. After that check what sata ports the drives are on, if they are in 5 and 6, there is problem.

Now if your using a secondary raid controller card, then I don't know what to tell you because they are out side of my expertise.

A quick question for you, h ave you used the drives for any thing else, any worries about the issues and bios problems with the drives?

 

[scotthew]

A quick question for you, h ave you used the drives for any thing else, any worries about the issues and bios problems with the drives?

While trying to figure out a way to update the firmware on the new SSDs I did a fresh Win7 install on one of the SSDs, but then I saw the firmware was the latest version so I deleted that partition.

I'll check up on your comment about the BIOS requiring some ports be IDE. That would make me sad 'cause I need at least 4 of ports in RAID so I can keep my current Win7 install on the old HDD drives.

 

[jitpublisher]

You know it is not recommended to put SSD's into RAID 0, right? (TRIM does not work if you put them into a RAID'd array)

 

[scotthew]

You know it is not recommended to put SSD's into RAID 0, right? (TRIM does not work if you put them into a RAID'd array)

Yeah, I first read about the TRIM concern today. I'm figuring however this won't be as much of an issue for me. I'm primarily concerned with read speed as my focus is gaming and my rewriting should be fairly minimal. Plus I should have roughly 40% (96GB) of free space so the delay before rewriting becomes an issue should be substantial. Plus I read that Intel is bringing out drivers that will allow TRIM in RAID.

Is this more or less correct, or am I making bad assumptions?

 

[jitpublisher]

Well two things come to mind.
For gaming, you won't see any difference between and SSD and regular drive, except for when you first load the game or load a level.
An SSD is so fast on its own, you won't see any difference in a single drive over RAID.

But, its up to you what you do with them.

 

[scotthew]

Well thanks to the help here and on Overclock.net I finally got my OCZs installed with a fresh Win7. I ended up placing the SSDs on the SATA2 ports as I was advised that my SATA3 Marvell controller fails at life.

Here's my first benchmark. I feel like it should be a bit higher with the RAID0, but it's still a 270% leap over my dual Raptors, so at least the money was well spent. If I understand the math right, this is showing about 70% SATA2 saturation, so I suspect the SATA3 wouldn't be much of an improvement even if I didn't have a crappy Marvell controller. Man I <3 those access times...