Question about SSDs in raid configurations.

[Umbaalo]

Regards,
I'm currently looking into purchasing 2x SSDs for a Raid 0 configuration. Has anyone tried this or have suggestions or input?
I'm thinking of getting either 2 of the OCZ Agility 2 60Gb SSDs or 2 of the OCZ Vertex 2 60Gb SSDs. My current setup thus far is Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo and the Intel I7-980X extreme edition cpu.
I've heard there will be some tweaking involved with fully optimizing SSDs, and wondering how much of a hassle it will be if I can in fact set those up. Thanks in advance for comments, advice, and witty sarcasm!

[fleaplus]

I have a pair of X25-E's in raid0 for my win7 install + wow. Choose a small stripe size (smaller than what you would do with platter drives) and leave a little space unpartitioned. I personally use a 50GB for my pair of 32GB drives because when in raid, trim does not exist. Intel drives use non-allocated blocks as spare area, so the internal garbage collection can keep the drive much closer to maximum speed when it has this extra spare area to work with. I also use 64kb stripe size, but 32kb should be doable considering you have so much extra processing power available.

Performance? I get about 500mb/s read and 400mb/s write with my array, as well as about 60mb/s random read/write. Wow loads as fast as the video card can copy the data and be ready. I really need to upgrade the GTX260 to a 480.

Oh, and other typical ssd advice, don't do silly things like defragging, running old os's like xp/vista, and benchmarking them to hell. I saw quite a few people at popular enthusiast forums running benchmark after benchmark, then being disappointed when they have stressed the garbage collection system on these so much that it can no longer keep performance within advertised specs.

[Elgert]

Sorry for ninja'ing the thread - but:
I am also considering using 2 SSD's for my next system - but the idea was to have one for win7 and one for WoW. Never really thought about raid for SSD's - but is that a better option? Do you gain as much speed as with "oldschool" disks?

[alcattle]

Reading about SSDs today and saw that Win 7 uses about 25 gigs, something to think about when deciding your sizes. Wow will vary with addons and # of Toons/accounts. maybe someone can post the siZe of their WoW folder.

[celticlad94]

Well my WoW folder is 19.3GB and I only have the main addons.

[Owltoid]

Are you guys 10 boxing or do you just have money to burn for either your OS loading up five seconds faster (how many times do you reboot your machine?) or non-noticable performance gain in WoW (one SSD is more than enough throughput for 5 WoWs)?

[ockhamsrazor]

I have money to burn, so I got a X25-M for Windows 7 boot, and a Raid 0 of two cruicial SSD's for WOW. All I can see is I don't regret it in the least. The improvement in boot time was well worth it and WOW never has any load issues.

[Owltoid]

not judging how others spend their money. Car enthusiasts spend thousands of dollars to get 0.1 seconds faster in a quarter mile. I'm just making sure new users know that for purely WoW purposes, it's total overkill and the money can likely be spent better in other areas of the computer build.

[ElectronDF]

Just my 2c. Sorry I can't help much. But I swear by Raid 0. I love it and wouldn't do anything else but. I used normal 7200's (RPM) until I got a better job and then got WD Raptors (10K RPM). Then I outgrew them since they were only 36GB each. I got the 150GB's and loved it. But then 2 weeks ago, the raid controller on my MB went out. It is sucky, but not so bad, I had backups, and the MB is like 3 years old. It shouldn't have happened, but oh well. It killed one of my HDs in the process. Okay, so the HD has a 5 year warranty, that is covered. I get 2 new 7200's to cover until I can get a new 10K. But it wouldn't work. Come to find out it was the raid controller. /sigh

I used the 7200's connected to my normal SATA bus, but Win 7 hated that I went from a raid to a normal and on top of that, I went from IDE (CD-Roms) to AHCI (don't ask what that is). I would boot up to loading hardware and then blue screen, and simule-reboot so I couldn't read the blue screen. /cry I got an 64GB SSD for OS and 128GB SSD for games. Going to put them on normal unraided SATA. It isn't what I want (raided 10K drives or raided SSDs), but I will live with it until new processors come out that makes me want to change motherboards. Then this board will get pushed down the food chain (I 5 computer-box).

If you understand how to deal with going from a normal drive to a raid and back and you don't mind crazy speed, then I would go with raiding. If you just want something to work without fiddling with it, I would just get an SSD for OS or gaming and then get a big normal drive to store stuff on.

[Pycno]

Regards,
I'm currently looking into purchasing 2x SSDs for a Raid 0 configuration. Has anyone tried this or have suggestions or input?
I'm thinking of getting either 2 of the OCZ Agility 2 60Gb SSDs or 2 of the OCZ Vertex 2 60Gb SSDs. My current setup thus far is Asus P6T Deluxe V2 mobo and the Intel I7-980X extreme edition cpu.
I've heard there will be some tweaking involved with fully optimizing SSDs, and wondering how much of a hassle it will be if I can in fact set those up. Thanks in advance for comments, advice, and witty sarcasm!

Some food for thought:

Motherboard: Does it support 980x out of the box? Most motherboards are shipped with a dated bios and require a quad-core inserted to install a bios update before it is compatible with hexacore, meaning you will have to buy an additional quad-core i7 cpu or borrow one if you board does not support 6 cores out of the box.
I ordered Asus p6x58-d premium and it shipped with 0703 bios and supported the 980x out of the box. The bios version is labeled on a small sticker somewhere on the board so you can see if it will work before you install the cpu.

SSD drives: I have not tried non-raid configuration, only raid-0 with 2x intel x25-m 80gb`s. Compared to my old platter drives this is a day and night difference, but I do not know what ssd`s are the best buy today. Many new drives have been introduced the last few months, but you should definately get at least one drive.

GFX: I really can not recommend 980x cpu and a single-gpu solution.
In my setup I have Radeon 5970 card and it is basically 2x5850 gpu`s on the same board, I am however only able to use one of these gpu`s as the internal crossfire can not be disabled.
My gpu is at 100% usage while cpu is typically around 30-40% usage. I could probably downgrade to a cpu for 1/4 the price without sacrificing any performance at all. All because I thought 1x card would be better then two separate cards

IMO there is no point in getting 980x unless you are also getting two separate graphics cards so you can render slaves on one card and main on the other, if you do this then I think the 980x can maybe give a performance boost.