Going SSD on the cheap? RAID-0 two SATA2 SSDs?

[VirtualLarry]

Still "thinking" about an SSD purchase. Few SSDs reach a price-point cheap enough for me to consider.

Recent prospects include the Vertex Plus, which have HORRID reviews at Newegg, lots of problems with those including file corruption. Supposedly a recent firmware fixes the problems, but I saw at least one report that it DID NOT.

Another possibility, was the Kingston V+100 96GB SSD, which was around $135 at Newegg, although there are like 4 different model numbers that are all V+100 96GB, so who knows which is which?

One more recent possibility, was the SanDisk Ultra SSDs, the newer G25 (25nm flash???) versions, are $140 for 120GB, and $300 for 240GB, around $1.25 a gig. Also available through BestBuy.com, and apparently Buy.com, for the same prices as Newegg.

Those SanDisk SSDs appear to be first-Gen SandForce controllers, which are generally usable, as long as you don't put your PC to sleep. Unsure how well their GC handles being in RAID-0. I know that the Kingston V+100 drives have aggressive GC that works well in RAID-0.

One thing that concerns me about the SanDisk, is that their support site doesn't seem to have a link to firmware downloads. They may be one of those companies that requires you to RMA your drive just to update the firmware. That's not a good sign to me.

 

[groberts101]

can't help but to give you a little crap here Larry.. but you've been so adamant about the cost of these things and now you want to buy 2 of them for an R0? lol

You'da been much further along to just bite that bullet long ago and get an entry level drive for less than $100 bucks.

Just seems odd that now since the GB/$$ reaches the required tipping point.. you are suddenly willing to drop 3 bills on them?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, the thing is, if you buy a smaller entry-level drive (60-64GB), they are slow, and you don't get the real SSD experience. If I had SATA6G on my mobo, I would just get a 128GB m4 or something and call it a day. But since I only have SATA2, I have to buy two drives and put them in RAID-0 to get equvalent speed of a SATA6G SSD.

Those SanDisk drives seem like just the ticket to me, if I can get the money together before they sell out.

The only thing that gives me pause is, they don't perform that well with uncompressable data, and I was thinking of running software FDE on top of the RAID-0.

 

[fuzzymath10]

Just about any new SSD of any capacity will perform significantly better in the applications intended to suit them looking strictly at performance and not the usefulness of more capacity. I'm not in it for 500MB/sec peak writes and reads which is strictly a bonus. I'm in it for the xxMB/sec min random writes and reads (measured in hundreds of KB/sec for hard drives).

Of course, 500MB/sec looks good in screenshots of crystaldiskmark or file copy dialog boxes

To call even a 32GB SSD slow is crazy after being saddled by spinning drives, subject to the condition above regarding screenshots.

 

[airdata]

I saw a newegg shell shocker this week for a 120gb ssd for ~$120. I bought mine last year for $235. So now is as good a time as ever to get one.

 

[Sunburn74]

150 buys you a 120gb agility 3 which screams (500/500 read writes). I'd buy it and cal it a day. Only thing is 120gb is actually less SSD space than I currently have.

 

[groberts101]

fuzzymath is right on target there.

Because thinking that an SSD that can R/W at 500/500 is going to be so much better than one that only runs at 200/200 is typically only applicable for storage transfer speeds(you will need raided HDD storage to see those gains though) and (aside form the obvious fact that the faster one will probably have better small file performance to help with heavy multitasking.

Fact is that once you have the data stored natively ON the SSD itself?.. then most of what an SSD has to offer is already in play. Insanely fast latency and file access.

Also consider that if you are still using an HDD based OS without much issue?.. then moving to ANY SSD will make you think that you have a new high-end system when you decide to multitask a bit harder. Night and day difference between HDD and SSD.

Like I keep trying to tell those who haven't made the switch to SSD yet.. go to Best Buy and try one with full intention of returning it. You will then know what to make of them and will dread having to return it and go back to that slow-ass HDD setup.

In fact.. the bigger difference is going BACK to HDD after using SSD for a little while. Not the other way around(from HDD to SSD) as most people expect.

 

[Voo]

How much would a raid0 improve random 4k r/w? Considering that we can't even split such an access (although I assume for a deeper qd we see improvements) I'd wager it'd be more than minimal.

So I agree with groberts and Co here: Probably not much difference, considering that you won't get too much mass storage you'll be copying around much on even 120gb. I know I don't really care about the 100mb/s write limitation of my Intel G2 and that's a heck slower than the sequential write speed of a modern HDD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I finally pulled the trigger. The OCZ Agility 30GB SSDs finally came in stock again, for $40 FS.

(I started a thread in Hot Deals about them.)
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2201735

I ordered five of them. One for a friend of mine, that's still running XP.

Of the remaining four, how should I configure them? I have two main desktops. I could run two seperate RAID-0 arrays of two drives each, which would give me two 60GB RAID-0s, one for each machine.

Or I could set up a single four-drive RAID-0 on my main machine. Might run out of drive bays, probably need to pick up a couple of dual-2.5" HD to 3.5" trays.

 

[Old Hippie]

Well, I finally pulled the trigger.

Thank God!

I know it'll be 6 months of trials, tribulations, and configurations but at least it'll be something different! LOL!

 

[groberts101]

Roflmao

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's my CDM scores, on a fresh drive, with a new partition, not being used as a system drive.

30GB OCZ Agility SSD

1TB Seagate 7200.12 HD

Edit: RAID-0 action

2x30GB OCZ Agility SSD in RAID-0 on ICH9R

 

[groberts101]

looks like write caching may be inactive on that array, Larry(as it is by default on all Intel boards).

 

[Emulex]

two raid-0 per machine then a couple of RE4 2TB to round it out

 

[VirtualLarry]

looks like write caching may be inactive on that array, Larry(as it is by default on all Intel boards).

What's the advantage/disadvantage of enabling that? I saw it was disabled in RST.

Edit: Also, what should my RAID-0 stripe size be? It defaulted to 128KB, so I went with that. With an SSD, is it better to have a smaller stripe size?

 

[groberts101]

What's the advantage/disadvantage of enabling that? I saw it was disabled in RST.

Edit: Also, what should my RAID-0 stripe size be? It defaulted to 128KB, so I went with that. With an SSD, is it better to have a smaller stripe size?

small file performance goes up due to ram caching effects. They perfected it pretty nicely.. and you want it.

64k is decent all around but I wouldn't be changing from 128k just for the heck of it. All you really do with stripe size is move the peak bandwidth around the chart, is all. Peak doesn't rise higher.. just comes in sooner or later like the camshaft timing affects a car engine. A big cam revs to beat hell but starts out slow.. whereas the little one gives better torque off the line but runs out of steam quicker when you rev it. We're talkin' less than 5-10% either way(one extreme to the other) though with stripe sizes so is not worth the worry, IMO.

I run all my SSD arrays at 128k and keep the HDD stuff at about 32k(or less) but just remember that the more stripes you have.. the greater the CPU/raidchip overhead becomes. Not that R0 is really worth worrying about anyways since it's about as good as it gets for any raid mode from an overhead/complexity standpoint.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, it's been a few days, and I cannot really say that it feels all that much faster. I mean, possibly it feels slightly "snappier", loading programs and whatnot, but not in a way that really stands out. It's rather subtle, whatever improvements there are.

It doesn't seem to boot any faster that I can tell, although it does shutdown faster.

One thing that was noticeable was doing a MalwareBytes scan. It scanned 17GB of files in a little over 3 minutes, which seemed to be much faster than it used to take with a HD. So that's a definite plus to the RAID-0 SSDs. But I rarely ever do a malwarebytes scan, so that improvement is somewhat irrelevant to day-to-day computer operation.

Oh well, it was cheap enough to mess with, I guess. Now I have experience setting up a RAID-0 on the ICH9R.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here's an updated benchmark pictures. Notice the scores seem to be about half of what they used to. Any ideas?

 

[LokutusofBorg]

When you put SSDs in RAID you get no TRIM, so you could be having issues due to that. How full are the drives? Did you manually over-provision, or just partition the full drives?

 

[Coup27]

So you have taken 2 drives from 2009 which cost $40 each which are chronically small, mashed them together, removed TRIM support and is now wondering why a week later they're beginning to crawl?

For very little more than your $160 outlay you could have bought a single 128GB current generation drive which would have kept pace with your array when new and maintained its performance over time.

Considering how long you've been faffing over buying an SSD and how long you've spent in this forum I'm astounded you've done what you've done.

 

[Old Hippie]

Notice the scores seem to be about half of what they used to. Any ideas?

My sig says it all.

 

[nanaki333]

When you put SSDs in RAID you get no TRIM, so you could be having issues due to that. How full are the drives? Did you manually over-provision, or just partition the full drives?

there are ways to do a "manual TRIM". i've been running SSDs in raid0 for many years now and they've always been nice and fresh

 

[deimos3428]

there are ways to do a "manual TRIM". i've been running SSDs in raid0 for many years now and they've always been nice and fresh

I have a 3x60GB array and it is a bit slower benchmark-wise. No discernable difference in real-world after a year without TRIM.

 

[groberts101]

as some have mentioned already.. has to do with lack of trim.. size of the array's free space.. and age/lack of complexity of that Indy controllers algorithms.

Easily fixed though. Run AS Cleaner(free space cleaner) and/or allow the drives to idle overnight for near full recovery.

The most likely cause is lack of garbage collection time for the drive to recover dirty nand. Regardless of the common belief that TRIM is required to allow the controller know what space to clean.. it can in fact do it very consistently with fully repeatable results.

I also ran a 6 drive Indy based array for more than 6 months and literally beat the snot out of it each day and allowed the drives to idle recover each night for near fresh speeds the very next day. So I know for fact that it can be done.

The biggest issue with proper idle recovery is that most don't realize that sleeping the system with the typical bios default setting will cause the S3 sleep mode to be used and kill power to the drive. Which of course kills GC in the process and eliminates recovery altogether.

So, either temp disable sleep while you idle the machine?.. or set the bios to S1 instead as that will keep power to the drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't sleep or hibernate. I have it set to "high power" prtofile. I leave it running doing DC. Which probably doesn't give the drives enough idle time.

Edit: Also running TrueCrypt FDE, which probably doesn't help. I think that it had to write to the entire drive one pass when it encrypted the drive. So even though I'm only using 30% of the space, it really has written to the entire space.

Edit: As long as it doesn't degrade any further, then it's fine with me.