Some new toys

[WC Annihilus]

Well, initially I wasn't planning to buy into the whole SSD thing quite yet since I'm a cheap bugger. But then Amazon put up a very nice looking deal, and well...







Anyways, I knew I was going to RAID0 these suckers, but the question was, what stripe size to use? At first I was going to use the general community consensus of either 64k or 128k, but then some comments made by a seemingly knowledgeable user led me to question this. So, I decided to do some testing of my own with 16k, 32k, 64k, and 128k stripe sizes. PCMark Vantage and ATTO were at default settings. IOMeter config files were taken from this thread. Between each test, the RAID array was broken down, each drive secure erased, and the array rebuilt/reimaged.

To show what I was coming from, HDD scores:



Now the actual SSD stripe testing scores...

16k:



32k:



64k:



128k:



So now I'm sitting here quite happily with a 16k striped array. For $75.56 a drive ($226.68 total) I'm quite satisfied with my purchase.

 

[cl0ck_ed]

Wow! Nice post, those 40gb kingston/Intel SSD's are the best value atm, shame they are 90 GBP in the UK

Can you notice a difference from regular hdd's? Do they hold up to all the hype??

 

[Diablo]

At those speeds, you will definitely notice the difference. On my setup which has two SSDs in raid 0, I find things just pop up instantly, no waiting around for 5 seconds for word or outlook. I find it really bad going back to my laptop with its 7200rpm disk. Seem to wait around forever for itunes and whatnot to load. It means that its hard to go back to disks. I hope you're pleased with those SSDs, they seem amazing value.

Only problem with RAID 0 is that there's no redundancy. That and you start to et limited by the motherboard controller. But with a dedicated PCIe cotnroller any idea of value goes out of the window.

 

[WC Annihilus]

I can definitely feel the difference. Most stuff generally loads near instantly. Even web browsing feels snappier, though that might be a bit of placebo effect working >.> But yes, overall I'm quite satisfied with my purchase.

 

[thestepster]

man i would love to get a load of SSD goodies going on youve been worked up to expect madness but u can see yourself how things work and if ur happy with it good for u mate i bet its a worthwhile purchase and i bet it brings you great speed

 

[AMD_PBz]

Those are some very impressive numbers pal.

It makes you wonder how fast things will be in the next 3-6 months when the technology is refined even now on the brink of Sandforce controlled SSD's

looking forward to testing out my 60 gb vertex turbo at the end of the month once Thuban is out

 

[tinytomlogan]

Is there raid trim support for these yet? I keep hearing whispers but Ive not seen anything actually confirmed.

 

[WC Annihilus]

Is there raid trim support for these yet? I keep hearing whispers but Ive not seen anything actually confirmed.

Unfortunately no. Due to poor wording on Intel's part, many people thought support was added when the RST 9.6 drivers were released. In reality it just allowed pass through support to SSDs not in an array, ie single SSD + RAID HDDs, TRIM can now make it to the SSD. Many of the sites who reported the initial misinformation have not seen fit to update their articles and thus there are still quite a few people who believe there really is TRIM for RAID. To help counteract degradation I made the partition smaller to leave space as a wear leveling buffer. Also, breaking down the array to secure erase and reimage really isn't too bad, takes maybe 30 minutes or so. Not sure how often I'll have to do that but should be at most every few months.

 

[alexhull24]

Great results, I just wish they were that cheap over here on the golden island.

Is it likely intel will add TRIM support for RAID in the near future? Most people going SSD will probably have enough cash for more than one I would have thought.

 

[WC Annihilus]

It's a bit hard to tell at this point. Certainly a while ago the word was they were. However, in several of the response e-mails given to the queries about the 9.6 driver release they said they were not working on them and had no plans to do so at the moment.