SSD Intel X25-V 40GB

[Trick]

In a nutshell, at full 80GB allocated they had perodic "valleys" in the performance graph. Almost predicitable even.

At 60GB, the performance was near constant. They attributed this to each drive's onboard controller using the unallocated space essentially as a buffer.

[kate]

Raising this thread from the dead...

I've just come into possession of two of these little guys - any good guides on setting them up as raid 0? Or is the process really straightforward for someone who is not terribly skilled/knowledgeable about hardware?

To put it in perspective, I know how to do stuff like update my drivers and install an OS, etc., and I can crack a case and put in more memory or a video card, but adding a new HDD is something I haven't done. I just want to add these both to an existing system as another HDD, not a boot drive or anything like that.

[ElectronDF]

Things I have seen.

OS's Vista and Win 7 get upset when you go from non-raid to raid. I didn't have any problem with XP when it did it like 4 times.

BIOS probably needs to be told you are using them in Raid form or it will just try to use them in normal form. No biggie, but it changes depending on which BIOS you use. Read manual in back (appendix) for a guide. Should step you through what you need to do.

OS's need drivers to really use the RAID as a raid and not just a un-drivered raid. It may actually let you use it as an un-drivered raid, but you won't get the full benefit from it. The crappy thing is drivers need to be installed during an install. For XP, just do a reinstall overtop of what you have, then patch SP3 and you are pretty much good. I haven't had any good luck with Vista or Win 7 reinstalling over top of itself.

I haven't used SSDs enough, but I heard raid negates trim. Think of trim as a way to defrag (not actually correct, but same result, it works faster). That might make things go slower than you might expect. Not a crazy lot, but still.

I would back the hell up of everything before you try to install it. If it eats your files, no one to blame but yourself. Also, it is probably how you will get the files onto the raided drives.

Make sure you back up imporant files (config files----WTF folder, key broadcasting configs, etc) so if the raid goes kaput, you can still get things back. You are using 2 devices, and all it takes is one to fail and bam, 100% data loss. In other words, backup more than you did in the past.

Good luck.

[fleaplus]

Raising this thread from the dead...

I've just come into possession of two of these little guys - any good guides on setting them up as raid 0? Or is the process really straightforward for someone who is not terribly skilled/knowledgeable about hardware?

To put it in perspective, I know how to do stuff like update my drivers and install an OS, etc., and I can crack a case and put in more memory or a video card, but adding a new HDD is something I haven't done. I just want to add these both to an existing system as another HDD, not a boot drive or anything like that.

Those drives work great in raid0. I have a similar setup with two X25-E's.

1) Use the Intel ICH10 onboard raid controller, unless you have a decent ($250+) hardware raid card.

2) Setup in the bios a 60GB partition, with 64kb stripe size. This is done because it gives the drive a larger "scratch" area to organize and manipulate data as it is written. Bottom line, the performance will stay within advertised specifications for much longer than if you used the entire space. An even smaller stripe size could theoretically improve performance when reading smaller files, but it is at the cost of more processor cycles.

3) These configs are bootable, so you can run both your OS and WoW off of the same raid0 if you would like. For me. Win7 (with hibernation off and pagefile reduced to 2GB) + WoW works out to about 25-27GB used after installed so there should be enough space for you.

4) If you use an older OS like XP, then be sure to NOT defrag the SSD's. This is not necessary and will actually degrade the drive's performance. Don't worry about TRIM - it is not supported on raid arrays and is not needed when partitioning like outlined above. Win7 is recommended if you have it or can afford it.

[kate]

I'm using Windows 7 home pro 64 bit - and really just want to use these as like, an E: drive or whatever, and don't necessarily need them to be bootable.

Will I need to reinstall Windows 7 on my main (non-SSD) HDD in order to get the drivers for an SSD installed if I don't want Win7 to be on the SSD raid? Or was that advice predicated on the idea that I would want to use them as a boot drive?

If I *did* want to run that as a boot drive, can I have it be bootable but ALSO still visible as an E: drive or whatever when I boot from my usual Windows installation? Would that be a more performance improving way to do things?

Thanks for the help!!!

[Sam DeathWalker]

If they are in raid DO NOT make them your boot drive; if either one goes down you are shot.

I would keep the system as is and raid0 them as another drive and toss all of wow into it. You also could possibly put your swap file (pagefile) there also not sure if thats best or not, probably is though.

I think all you need do is set up the raid0 in the bios (read bios instructions or motherboard instructions) and it should be "plug and play" after that. Win7 should have the proper drivers I would guess. But Im not 100percent sure. The you can search for updated drivers.

[mikekim]

If they are in raid DO NOT make them your boot drive; if either one goes down you are shot.

this holds true for any raid or normal drive, if you don't have a backup of the drive then you are stuffed when it fails

[kate]

Thanks for the help, all! It's been extremely informative!

Unfortunately for me, it turns out my bios does not by default support RAID configurations, so I need to get a card for it anyway - well, I guess for now I'll just run the drives as individual drives.

[Kicksome]

this holds true for any raid or normal drive, if you don't have a backup of the drive then you are stuffed when it fails

Yeah, I just had a raid 1 (disk mirror) fail - both drives were lost. Make sure you backup your drives, even if they are mirrored.

[kate]

I just installed one of them, and it was really, really easy. My system has these kinda open gate things that let me just push in a drive. Turned it on, BIOS picked it up without me doing anything, Win 7 automagically installed the drivers, formatted it, copied stuff over and boom, it's up and running.

I'm not sure how much of a difference I notice yet, but it seems like things are faster. Thanks for the help, all!