Being at work on a Saturday, the mind wanders...

I was wondering if anyone has any personal experience running a bunch of SSD's in a RAID-0 setup on a dedicated (and not cheap) Raid controller.

For the purposes of this madness and staying within the realm of what MB has on sale on their site:

4 x Patriot 2.5" SSD 32g drive (PE32GS25SSDR) ($584)
1 x Adaptec 3405(PCIe4x) ($499)

For about just over 1200$ after taxes.

I have an OCZ Solid Series drive, and the performance is OK. Would this setup easily provide 4x the throughput, as I don't see that much info on the numbers this thing can throw out. As I am running 32bit XP I don't really have much of a clue on the usefulness of doing this getup right now, as I am waiting for Windows 7 to install a true 64bit OS.

for the amount that'd cost. just buy a velociraptor. or are you keen on ssd's?

this is a bit more extremem but here..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

Skiman, got any imput on this scenario?

Got a velociraptor/raptor (see my sig). I like the SSD option due to the low power/no noise/small size/0.1ms seek time. I'm not putting my OS on the Raid-0. Never doing that again as I got burned once.

I'm guessing the youtube vid is the 24 SSD Samsung drive "faster than gravity" 10,000$ option (at work, won't load heh).

Velociraptors, yes they are fast, but they don't hold a candle to any sort of SSD configuration.

This is probably still several months off anyways. I'll probably just wait to get the OCZ-Z drive.
http://www.mysterybyte.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1350

The 2 drives in my gaming box. Yeah, HD tach isn't the best benchmark but I don't run a benchmark(eting) site.

You are correct in getting an actual hardware RAID card if you really want to see the big gains for SSDs in RAID 0. Software RAID used by motherboard chips just don't yield the potential gains.

The 32 GB Patriot cards are on the grossly expensive side compared to the 64 GB GSkill cards that can be found elsewhere in Canada.

I have no reservations in using RAID 0 for an OS and have my two GSkills doing this very thing. The ease by which an OS can be installed and subsequent restore makes for a worst case of about 1.5 hrs down time should a full re-install be needed.

Treat yourself to running your OS from the SSDs and enjoy.

Yeah I was only using an example form the site. If I have to get it elsewhere then I will.

Here are my results for RAID on the ASUS Rampage II Extreme using the ICH10 chipset with software RAID 0.

2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB - 32mb run. These cost $83.00 each at Mysterybyte




2x GSkill 64GB SSD formated at 4k cluster. these each cost $170.00 CDN elsewhere



This is the single GSkill 64 GB drive

And my Saturday insanity bleeds into Sunday night heh.

So if I were to get 4 of those bad boys at and say a 3ware 9650SE-4LPML (totalling about 1200 bux), would you think I'd get a decent 400-500MB/s Skiman? That's basically the same price for banging together 4 x 150GB velociraptors, and not getting a raid card.

This would be more of a hobby, than a serious attempt at breaking the land speed record. I know what can be done with drives in the EXTREEM end of the spectrum, I'm trying to get something that will be useful for the next 3 or so years until SATA 3 pans out properly.

I can't see a reason why I couldn't get it, other than being rediculous in scope and absurd in price but meh.

Anyone have any expereience with 3ware drives?

--Edit--Seems as though 3ware raid cards don't work well with SSD's oh well I got time.

From OCZ forums...
Both Areca and Adaptec have "noticed" SSDs. The extremely high end Areca ARC-1231ML has the best results with SSDs, showing low latency and high throughput. The Adaptec cards show high throughput but add a little latency. Since the Adaptec cards are significantly cheaper then this may simply be a side effect of not spending massive sums of money on the RAID card. However it's possible Adaptec could eliminate this with a firmware update.

Anyone using a RAID card with SSDs is as D111 has said using a card that is specifically and carefully designed to extract the best performance from mechanical drives as possible. If you like you can call them mechanical drive specialists. While motherboard connections are nowhere near as advanced. As a result the current crop of RAID cards may offer nothing over a simple motherboard solution (besides bandwidth and processing power), and may in fact hamper things.

At least one RAID card manufacturer has produced a card that is at least configured for SSDs. We don't know who it is yet since it's only today that OCZ have shown this new Z Drive at CEBIT. It's not clear if it's a card specifically produced to power SSDs. Likely it's an existing RAID card layout with some features that are of no value cut off.... or it's simply an off the shelf card. I suspect it's not an Adaptec since it doesn't have the holey PCI bracket slot cover thing. Areca have said they are working with SSD manufacturers, perhaps this is what they mean and it's an Areca.

Turns out the 9650 only supports the million dollar SSD's from intel, which defeats the purpose.

The Adaptec 2405, retails for 300$ or so, seems to be the only "reasonable" option right now. Save 100$ I guess a little research saves money heh. I've read about very strong results with Areca controllers as well (ARC-1210 is in the same price range).

That is some serious hard drive performance you're after.

I read the same information about the 3ware, they also seem to have poor write performance when working in uncached mode.

Bit of wierd result. Who knows since it is inside a virtual machine.

and what is that strange graph representin'?

It might just be a RAID 5 hard drive that is based on an HP SAN with 12 450gig 15K fiber channel attached SCSI disks lol.

Might hah. That makes my 1100$ future investment seem kidna puny lol.

Well the SAN is only lists for about $120,000.

Sometimes my job is fun lol.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! 120 Grand would buy a decent amount of uber Intel drives as well.