Messing around with RAIDed SSDs...

So I got a small PCI e x1 RAID card. Some cheapo thing that is 2 port and like $17 on FleaBay. I also have 2 OCZ Vertex 2 60GB drives. I got the card setup in Windows and used the Windows disk utility to set up a striped array on the 2 drives. I then downloaded the Crystal Disk benchmark utility and let 'er rip.

RAID 0 SSD performance:



HDD performance:



I know I could probably get better results if I used the hardware RAID 0 in the card but it seems to have last been updated for Vista so I can't use the built in utility. No matter...

I may move my OS and stuff to this drive for now until I can get my new PC system up and going.

 

Is it just me or is it kinda slow? With a single SSD, no raid, I got 560 MB/s reads... With a cheaper iSSD, 350MB/s ... 10MB chunks or 1000MB chunks (as I think you did) gets the same results... Maybe your cheap raid card is the bottleneck here?

Yeah putting your OS on a SSD is a good move, along with most used programs, it's hella faster. Doing this made my old laptop last 2 more years than I had planned.

 

The general consensus from what I remember reading on the net is that generally RAID'ing SSDs makes them much slower.

 

One thing to look at here is not the sequential speeds. Those are never really used unless you are moving large files. Look at the 512K and both 4K stats. Those matter more in the Windows OS since those are the majority of what it does when running. And yes, it is my hardware that's slowing down the drives. 1.3GHz AMD E-300 APU with no name PCI E X1 2 port card that runs a Silicon Image chip. Very crappy stuff minus the drives themselves.

Interesting thing is the 4K QD32 performance. Major jump there. Around 130X increase on the write side.

I currently use this setup as a cache drive since I'm waiting to get a new mobo that has built in RAID utility. The cache has helped out quite a bit. Really useful for a 10 hour video loop project I'm working on. Doing the audio separately in Audacity and the memory usage without it would have gone through the roof...

 

So I was able to finally get into the BIOS of the RAID card and build the RAID 0 drive from there. After I got it set up I then partitioned it in the OS as best as possible. This ended up being an extended logical drive. I ran my benchmark again but with 100MB test 5X this time around.

Results for 2 OCZ Vertex 2 in true hardware RAID 0:



4K speeds improved dramatically.

 

PCI Express SSD's are where it's at, even the sub-par cards that apple is putting in the new macbook air can achieve almost 800 MB/s

 

I don't have that kind of money. This setup cost me around $85 total and I don't have RAID on the motherboard or even spare SATA ports. It has 2 and both are used by HDD and ODD.

 

Sonic dude, seriously try your SSD without raid first to see if it really improves, because IMHO your speeds aren't that great for SSDs, let alone raided ones.

 

This is a cheap PCI E x1 card. Of course the speeds are going to be crap. I'm saving my bits for a better board with RAID functions built in. Then I'll just save the card as SATA port expander. I was just messing around with this for fun. Nothing serious here.

 

My point is that if the raid card slows down the SSDs, there's not point in it, except maybe for raid1... No hard feelings, I just wanted to be sure you get the maximum out of your drives.
SSDs are magik little boxes when they work right.

 

This is software RAID using Windows Disk Manager right? This would explain most of the slowness.

 

I wouldnt agree.

 

on board raid isnt true hardware raid.

Change your test data from 100MB to 1000MB, else the test wont work well.

 

Have you ever had any issue with 1 drive failing to detect during boot? I ask because I'm running 2 Crucial M4's in RAID 0 and sometimes during the RAID BIOS where it detects the drive, one is missing and so it fails to boot. Usually a quick reset cures it, but still annoying.

 

Not sure about SSDs but in mechanical drives that is imminent sign of impending drive failure (And if you have a decent server RAID card, you'd generally know if it was about to fail because you'd be getting a bunch of 'SENSE <read/write> errors'). I'd advise you to backup anything important on those drives in case one of them flunks.

 

It can also be a dodgy sata cable. Had the exact same thing with another ssd raid setup some years ago. The drives are still going strong in other machines

 

Got my Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB some days ago, and finally got some time yesterday to install Windows 7 and start configuring it. Unfortunately my benchmarks are around half the advertised ones, so that sucks, but it still works pretty well and fast (faster than OP, though mine is just 1 SSD, no RAID).

 

My post was 2x Samsung 840 pros.