SSD Are Me!

[kdogg]

Originally Posted by photon

You should just be able to put in the SSD, specify that as the boot drive and load the OS on it and the RAID drive should show up in the new OS as long as it has the correct drivers.

If this is true, then Dell Tech Support sucks

My RAID disks were plugged into SATA 0 and SATA 1. They told me to plug my SSD into SATA 0, and move my RAIDS. I'm currently restoring the Dell image to my SSD.


Should I be able to mess with this later on to see if I can get my RAID back?

[photon]

I don't know, I've never moved drives around ports to see if the array is still readable.

Restoring the Dell image might not be the best thing either, as they probably don't align the clusters properly and the Windows build won't be provisioned for an SSD properly. There's a bunch of changes you should make to Windows if running on an SSD that Windows does for you if it's recognized during the install. And I don't think there's any way to fix the cluster alignment after the fact.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by kdogg

No clue, how do I check?

Baring looking at the specs of the machine as you ordered it, you could look in the device manager, or run something like SIW .

It really doesn't matter though, now that I think about it more. When I posted originally, I was thinking Dell might have used some messed up RAID controller that had this requirement, but that is just ridiculous. It is far more likely that the Dell tech didn't know what he was talking about. You might not even be using a hardware RAID, who knows.

Everything Photon has said is pretty much correct. I would do a full data backup to an external drive. Then do a clean install on the SSD plugged into any sata port - it isn't worth messing with moving the RAID drive ports, just make sure the port you use for the SSD is enabled in BIOS and set as the bootable drive. Then redo your raid into a RAID 1 and load the data back on - This will depend on if it is hardware or software RAID.

Just a disclaimer: I have never converted a software RAID 0 to a software RAID 1 in Windows 7. I assume it should be straight forward, but make sure you look for some instructions online if you are not sure.

[photon]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/i...y-to-sandforce

Interesting, Intel came out with a SandForce drive. Doesn't have the BSOD issues the other SandForce drives had (and still have a bit of I guess), so that's good, an indication of Intel's validation.

Probably the drive to get, Intel reliability + the fastest controller.

[kdogg]

Got my machine up and running. Reconfigured my drives back to RAID 1, and reinstalled Windows on the separate SSD drive. No issues like Dell said I would have.

I purchased a CORSAIR Force GT 120 GB SATA3. It is suppose to have read speed of 555 MB/s and write speeds of 515MB/s.

When running CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1, I'm only getting seq read speeds of 470 MB/s and seq write of 171 MB/s.

Are SSD suppose to be configured in a certain way to achieve max speeds? I think my read is close enough, buy my write is no where near the theoretical speed. I`m using all default Windows settings. Any ideas?

[photon]

Benchmarks are pretty variable, and the very act of benchmarking a SandForce drive actually degrades the performance of the area it uses temporarily (until the garbage collection can run).

Your speeds are correct for your drive, you've got it configured correctly.

If you want to see the high values for the sequential write speed change CrystalDiskMark to use compressable test data (File->Test Data, choose all 0's or all 1's). SandForce writes are so high because they compress and deduplicate the data before writing, when you use random data during the test it can't compress or deduplicate it (because it's random data), so you see the actual worst case scenario for write performance. If you set the data to 0's or 1's you'll see closer to the theoretical maximums.

My Patriot Wildfire gets 470MB/s and 175MB/s in CDM for sequential as well with random data, so you're right on target.

You wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway, random performance is what really makes the difference in Windows (unless you work with huge files).

[Vulcan]

kdogg, you may lose some speed using raid 1 instead of ACHI. I know I forgot to change to ACHI in my bios and my speed was about 3/4 of what my SSD (OCZ sandforce Sata3) was rated at. After changing it, in bios and Windows7 it's now running at it's rated speed although in everyday use, I don't really notice any difference.

Won't you lose TRIM running Raid 1?

[Rathji]

I think his old drives are RAID1

[photon]

Yeah his old drives were RAID 1.

[psyang]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

kdogg, you may lose some speed using raid 1 instead of ACHI. I know I forgot to change to ACHI in my bios and my speed was about 3/4 of what my SSD (OCZ sandforce Sata3) was rated at. After changing it, in bios and Windows7 it's now running at it's rated speed although in everyday use, I don't really notice any difference.

Won't you lose TRIM running Raid 1?

I think kdogg's RAIDed drives are not SSD, so TRIM is a non-issue (as has already been pointed out).

That said, depending on his controller, RAID1 may actually increase read speed over JBOD. Some controllers will read a RAID1 array in parallel - similar to what would happen in RAID0. I've only heard about this in higher-end RAID controllers, though, but it's a cool idea.

And if his RAID controller is the built-in Intel software RAID, then I think setting AHCI will not allow him to put his other drives in RAID.

[Hack&Lube]

If he's willing to wipe and reformat and has a Z68 board, he can use an SSD with his drives in RAID1 for SSD caching which has been seen to dramatically improve mechanical speeds to near SSD speed levels.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/i...ching-review/2

[kdogg]

That's correct. I have regular 1TB drives in a RAID 1, and my SSD is seperate from that. Sorry for the confusion.

I will try the 0 / 1 sequential writing tonight to see if that gets me closer to the theoretical maximums.

Thanks for the tips guys.

[MarchHare]

I have a mid-2011 27" iMac; is it possible to create a bootable OS installation (Lion and Windows 7 via Bootcamp) on an external Thunderbolt SSD? If so, what is the performance like?

[Rathji]

Thunderbolt spec claims 20Gbits/s, which is far more than the claims of SATA III at 6 Gbits/s, which should easily handles any SSD speeds on the market.

I have never used Thunderbolt to know the actual performance, but by the spec, it should work quite well.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Thunderbolt spec claims 20Gbits/s, which is far more than the claims of SATA III at 6 Gbits/s, which should handle any SSD speeds on the market.

I have never used Thunderbolt to know the actual performance, but by the spec, it should work quite well.

SSDs can't even saturate SATA III IIRC, unless you RAID0 a ton of them together.

Honestly, the best setup would be a couple SSDs in RAID0 (since MBTF is so high) and then buy a cheapo mechanical to do nightly backups.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

SSDs can't even saturate SATA III IIRC, unless you RAID0 a ton of them together.

Honestly, the best setup would be a couple SSDs in RAID0 (since MBTF is so high) and then buy a cheapo mechanical to do nightly backups.

Yeah, it wont even come close, but SATA II is a bit slow for some drives, so I figured the comparison would be a bit more conservative if I used SATA III speeds. I changed the wording of my post to be a bit more clear.

[MickMcGeough]

The Intel 330 series looks very promising:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/16/i...s-start-at-89/

Not the fastest money can buy, but 3yr warranty and good prices.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Thunderbolt spec claims 20Gbits/s, which is far more than the claims of SATA III at 6 Gbits/s, which should easily handles any SSD speeds on the market.

I have never used Thunderbolt to know the actual performance, but by the spec, it should work quite well.

Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps bi-directional (20 max in total at the same time, but only 10 max in either direction).

Either way, you're right in that an SSD inside a Thunderbolt enclosure should (theoretically) show no performance difference versus an internal SSD connected to a SATA III port.

[FanIn80]

So any thoughts on the new Vertex 4s?

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Promos/...ertex4.cm.aspx

I know, it's OCZ, so the first thought for some might be to stay away... but I used a Vertex 3 for a long time without any issue, and I still have a couple of Vertex 2s running strong in various devices. They had a bad firmware update with their Agility drives (which were the cheapest of their three lines, so they were the ones most people bought), and I think that kind of gave the company an undeserved bad rap. Their Vertex offerings have been great for me. I just stay on top of the firmware updates, and always wait a couple days after one's been released so I can see if their are any reported problems.

Anyway... thoughts? According to Anandtech, the Vertex 4s blow everything else away at sequential and random writes, as well as "high workload" reads (like you'd see in an enterprise deployment), but they really drop the ball on the "typical computer load" reads. Usually, read speed is pretty important in choosing a drive, but the expectation is that the read thing will be cleared up in the next couple weeks with a firmware update. The cool part is that the drives right now are actually shipping with a full 1GB of on board DDR3 RAM for caching - which is insane.

The Everest 2 controller is flanked by a 512MB Micron DDR3-800 DRAM. Another 512MB chip exists on the flip side of the PCB bringing the total to a whopping 1GB of DDR3 memory on-board. OCZ makes no effort to hide the DRAM's purpose: Everest 2 will prefetch read requests from NAND into DRAM for quick servicing to the host. When serviced from DRAM, reads should complete as fast as the interface will allow it – in other words, the limit is the 6Gbps SATA interface, not the SSD.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5719/o...ew-256gb-512gb

[cal_guy]

Only 512MB of that RAM will be active though in order to maintain parity with future shipping version which will only have 512MB of RAM.