Hardware Raid vs. Software Raid and what's in between

[shaykal]

Hello all,

So I'm waiting to get 2 Samsung 830 128GB SSD this week.
I want to Raid 0 them both.
The question is what's the best way to do it.
My mother board is the Asrock z77 extreme9. It has:
2 SATA3 6GB/s intel - supports Raid.
4 SATA2 3GB/s intel - supports Raid.
4 SATA3 6GB/s Asmedia - doesn't support Raid.
Currently the windows is installed on a crucial c300 128GB SSD which is connected to one of the Intel SATA3 port.
These are the options:
1) Install the new 830 SSDs in the Asmedia ports (which are SATA3) and use software Raid.
2) Install the new 830 SSDs in the Intel SATA3 ports, install windows on them and use the hardware Raid.
3) Install the new 830 SSDs in the Intel SATA3 ports, but boot from the current crucial c300 (will be connected to the Asmedia SATA3 port) and still use the hardware Raid.
4) Buy a separate Raid controller and connect the 830 SSDs to the Raid controller. will boot from the crucial SSD connected to the Intel SATA3 port.
5) Other suggestions?

In case you think that I should get a Raid controller, could you suggest a hardware Raid controller that's compatible with a consumer/workstation machine?

In case of other suggestions, could you please elaborate?

Thanks!
Shai

 

[ccaution]

Go with the 2) and leave the 3rd party controllers for mechanicals and opticals only

 

[ObscureParadox]

Just move the boot drive over to the Asmedia ports and then raid the Samsung drives in the intel ports

 

[shaykal]

Thanks for your answers!
Please note that I also published a poll for this

 

[airdeano]

and RAIDing SSD is for?

airdeano

 

[S_I_N]

I'd put them on the intel sata 3 ports and do a fresh install. This is how I have been doing it for the last 1.5ish years. Works great no issues Garbage collect works very well on these more current ssd's

and RAIDing SSD is for?

airdeano

those who arent afraid of real power lol hahahaha sorry had to do it. No ssd raid is epic yeah most wont see the real world benefits but its cool to say I have 2 ssd's in raid 0

so in a nutshell its about e-peen

 

[Bang]

From what Ive read RAIDing 2 SSD's dosent really show much in the way of performance gains. They are already very fast as it is. The one advantage it has though, is combining 2 smaller ie. 120GB into one larger 240GB (theoretically, before format.)

Yar, I would whack the new ones into the Intel SATA ports and do a clean install, (using the other one for storage) and take adavatage of their SATA3 capabilites.

 

[S_I_N]

true no noticeable performance gains but benching you will see it. But as you and I said ones fast enough by itself 2 are almost twice as fast but it cant be felt. Then as you said theres the making them one drive thing.

 

[Bang]

If he had more Intel SATA3 raid controllers he could have all three SSD's in raid 0.... unfortunaltely........ he doesnt.

 

[S_I_N]

naw just 2 in raid as there matching I wouldnt toss in the other slower one as it would just slow the others to its speeds.

 

[shaykal]

and RAIDing SSD is for?

Fun!!!


But seriously, if the choice was between 1 SSD 256GB or 2x 128GB SSDs in Raid 0, wouldn't the 2 SSD in raid 0 be better performance wise?
I saw in benchmarks that people got double read and write speeds.
you don't think that it would be noticeable in real life applications and games?

 

[Bang]

SSD's are so blazingly fast its hard to get a performance improvement from them in RAID. You also have to take into account that 256GB drives perform better than their 128GB counterparts. as do the 512GB drives outperform their 256GB counterparts. Thats in the hardware. The bigger the drive, the better the hardware inside it. Tomshardware has heaps of charts on everything, including SSD's. Go have a look. The bigger the drive the better they work..

Maybe thats just a reward for spending more money on a bigger drive. The cheaper the drive, the more cheaply it preforms... is all I can figure.

 

[Josh Weston]

Having two SSDs in RAID0 is, really, just to be able to say you can. The results do show up in benchmarks etc. but there's no difference in real life. An application such as Microsoft word opens in less than a second whether I RAID my drives or not.
For me, RAIDing the drives actually makes my system booting into Windows take longer, as there's an annoying RAID config screen that takes a few seconds of my precious time away from me.
If I had the choice to go back in time i'd go for a single larger drive.

 

[Bang]

Yep. RAIDing mechanical drives can really help performance, but in SSD's there is no real world difference.

A major reason people buy SSD's is so they dont have to wait so long for the operating system to load. If RAIDing 2 or more SSD's makes boot times longer then RAID defeats the purpose of buying an SSD to start with: faster boot times.

If Windows 7 boots in 40 seconds and you have to boot once a day, that ends up being 243 minutes of your life wasted in a years time, just booting your computer. More than 4 hours a year!! More if you have to boot for various reasons, like up date installs, driver installations etc. its easy to double or triple tat time. SSD's save the pain of long and repeated boot times.

 

[S_I_N]

ok first off boot times are measured post bios. And the raid config is another bios so boot times are not affected. yes it takes maybe 3-5 seconds for it to get thru the raid bios but really who cares. I raid 2 smaller drives because of cost effectiveness. its was cheaper to buy 2*240GB than it would of been to buy 1 480GB. I raided them together simply because I wanted to install everything on a single drive letter. I get upset when I forget that oops I wanted that on my hdd cause of the space it takes up. Now I no longer have to worry about it.

raid isnt just about performance boosts it can be about alot of things.

 

[Whaler_99]

I run a single SSD which is more than fast enough, then have RAID 0 on one set of mechanical drives where I install all my games to. Maximize performance and can also have a lot of the "larger" games installed and ready to running.

 

[shaykal]

So, yesterday I finally got the 2 Samsung 830 and I installed them.
I had some hard time installing windows on them.
I got a message saying that I can't install windows on my Raid 0 partition.
I looked up this message and found that for some reason I had to load the Raid drivers from my motherboard's driver's CD during the installation of windows. I thought it was kinda odd that windows doesn't have the drivers for Raid, but I saw other people that came across the same issue and it worked for them.
After I tried that and it didn't help, I read in the motherboard's manual that during installation I can only have 1 Raid configuration (previously I already had configured Raid 1 for backup), and if I want to define another one, I'll have to do that using windows utility. So I had to delete this configuration and have only Raid 0.
This time it actually worked and I was able to install window successfully.
So now the question is, won't I be able to configure 2 Raid configuration at the same time?
If I go ahead and define Raid 1 in addition to my existing Raid configuration, will that be done using software Raid or hardware Raid?

I did this installation late last night, so I didn't have time to test this.
I appreciate your help!

Thanks!

 

[S_I_N]

when installing its best to have only one drive hooked up.I dont mean a solo hdd or sdd but one drive letter so if you were having 2 raids showing up in the select drive portion of the install it may of not worked. Also I had a helluva time installing to my Hyper X 3K raid at first. Seems one ssd didnt format properly. But after I finally got it ...it went smooth as silk from there.

 

[Whaler_99]

For your RAID1 set, just make sure you don't use Windows Disk Management to do it. In Windows, install the Raid manager software for your mobo. For many, this is the Intel Rapid Storage technology (used to be Matrix) for the first 6 SATA ports. Then some motherboards use additional controllers for extra ports, like Marvel and such. If you configure the RAID in there with unassigned disks, then go into Windows Disk Management and rescan for new disks, you should see your new hardware based RAID drive come up.