RAID 0, not the improvement i was hoping for. help?

[zella]

hi guys, i just bought a second ssd and set up raid 0. the improvement was not as drastic as i thought it would be, no noticeable decrease in load times etc.

my computer maxes out everything on the windows experience index, the highest being 7.9. the only thing it didnt max out was the data transfer rate, which with one ssd was on 6.9, and because it rates your machine on the lowest sub score, well you can imagine i want to have a rating of 7.9, now i know windows experience points arent the most highly regarded benchmark but i want the 7.9 bragging rights! so now with 2 ssd in raid 0 it has gone up to 7.3, is this the best i can do?

asus maximus iv extreme (b3 revision)

intel i7 2600k @ 4.8 GHz

Corsair dominator gt 8gb @ 1866 MHz

nvidia gtx 580

2x 128 GB kingston SSDNOW v100

im using the intel chipset sata controller for the raid 0, 64k stripe size

i have the latest bios for everything

the SSD are rated at [from the official spec]

Sequential read throughput —

250 MB/s read

Sequential write throughput —

230 MB/s write

PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score 3 —

20,571

now im sure you guys want to know some benchmark results but im a real hdd rookie and i dont know what the best ones are, so if you let me know i will get them for you. this will hopefully be helpful for anyone considering raid 0 (so you can see if ive wasted my money before you do!)

Thanks in advance

Z

 

[sheroo]

I have 2 vertex 2 ssd's in raid 0 with 128 bit stripe and get 7.9 on the Windows score.

 

[hmmblah]

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

I have a single C300 SSD in an old C2D laptop and I get a 7.6 on the WEI. That same SSD in a faster i7 machine gets a 7.9. You should be close to that with a single V100 I would think and 2 should get 7.9. Run CrystalDiskMark and see what you get.

 

[mayhem]

64k to small you need 128k with ssd's not 64 as you take a perfaomce hit at 64k.

 

[S_I_N]

64k to small you need 128k with ssd's not 64 as you take a perfaomce hit at 64k.

agreed you want the bigger stripe for better performance.

 

[zella]

thanks, you guys are amazing. i put this thread up in the corsiar forums and they gave me some bullshiz cos my ssd wasnt from them, as if they couldent help. even thought i have 200£ worth of their ram, and an H70!

so i need to go with 128k strip size, well the thing is, that is the default i know, the reason i chose 64k was becuase of this info :

http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/690318-raid-0-hdds-best-stripe-size.html

if you check out his graph he shows 64k to be the best.

i will try 128 and report back. thanks again

peace

 

[S_I_N]

keep in mind he used 2x250gb HDD's not SSD's another thing to keep in mind is that ssd's are already pretty fast and raiding them will increase performance to a degree but imho if you wanted to see a marked performance improvement you'd need to do like 4 of them on an aftermarket sata raid card

but to be totally honest if its just the Win index score then you should be close with what you have.

 

[zella]

my other question then is what raid controller should i use. im talking on board, im not gonna go buy a discrete card.

my two options are the intel one which is on the chipset, or the third party marvel one?

will there be any difference, does anyone have any figures to back them up?

 

[S_I_N]

that one I cant answer sorry I just use the first set of sata port 1-4 for raid as they are normally on a single controller. The remaining 2 on my board are on a separate controller. neither of mine are intel so cant answer to that (lol AMD board)

 

[mayhem]

The Intel one is faster marvel has a 3gb band with limit on the marvel one and its not as impressive and youll only get 64k striping though the marvel. Change to the intel change it up it 128kb and over all speed will be better in read and wrights. once you done his visit the intel site as well and see if there any updated raid drivers for you chip set and these will give a little more of a boost.

 

[mayhem]

Youll never see a "VAST" improvement from running 1 SSD to 2 SSDs in stripe as ssds are fast any way it will only be noticeable on shit ssd's that are slow in the first place

.

And as for censorship @ corsiar forums this place does the same mate, they dont like some thing they remove it and edit peoples posts and it happens all the time.

 

[BaMb1N0]

you may wanna test it with AS SSD benchmark. the windows expierience thing is way overrated.

concerning stripe size: if the file written on the raid 0 volume is smaller than the stripe size, you will not have any improvement in transferrates at all, because the file will then completely be written on a single drive and not striped on both. so, in my humble opinion, stripe size is to be chosen based on the type of data you're keeping on that particular volume. 32KB or 64 KB usually are good for OS and stuff like that. if you're keeping large media files (music, films...) - what you probably won't to on an SSD - a larger stripe size (128KB) will certainly boost transfer rates.

i'd rather say that the mass storage controller will most likely be one of the bottlenecks. especially amd and nvidia chipsets have not been famous for particularly good storage controllers. so, if you've got a really fast storage controller, for example an add-card like one of the adaptecs 58xx, you may even decrease stripe size a little.

best regards

BaMb1N0