groberts101
Golden Member
- Mar 17, 2011
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So my decision is stuck on whether I should use RAID 0 for the SSDs on the LSI controller or on the onboard Intel ICH10R?
15 minutes or less and all restored. I do regular backups
Like I already said in my earlier response.. I've done both and prefer the faster response times and superior caching performance of the Intel chip even at the expense of large file transfer speeds. But 550MB/s is nothing to sneeze at for a snappy OS volume. I just use cards for their intended purpose which is typically mass storage and faster large data transfers.
And not to be a smartass or overly critical here.. but if you have your image restores down like that?.. why not just try a few different configurations?
We can all give input and tell you what to do until we're blue in the face here.. but ultimately you'll need to be the judge of what best suits YOUR particular usage patterns. Of course the typicvally used file sizes and amount of data transfered PER worksession AND over the long term will be the deciding factor on the time you gain from raiding various volumes. If the gains were minimal as some point out?.. I wouldn't have invested thousands in cards/drives to do it. No placebo affect for those that need the speed, to be sure.
So, the more data you tend to transfer with increased frequency?.. the greater the importance of raided storage volumes. Having an OS drive that can R/W data at 550MB/s means nothing if you are bottlenecked to single HDD speeds since that OS volume will only read/write data as fast as the drive it's coming from or going to. Even on systems with lowly sata2 SSD speed bottlenecks.. any single HDD based storage volume is going to become the next biggest bottleneck. Unless you have them raided to better compliment the SSD's speed capability.
It's pretty pricy if you need to add drives to do it(raid to raid).. but it sounds like you already have the available hardware needed to achieve "raid to raid" type speeds. Personally speaking.. I'll never go back to single drive speeds and use additional R0's to back up my primary R0's(OS and storage volumes). Obviously get's very expensive to use that method of redundancy.. but the benefits are there if your time is worth more than the hardware needed to do it.
Never EVER seen a power user that's grown accustomed with raid to raid transfer speeds go back to single drive OS/storage volumes on a sata2 system. Sata3 systems with SSD to SSD OS/storage configurations maybe.. but they are obviously going to be space limited unless they use raided HDD storage volumes to better compliment the sata3 SSD's speed capability.
PS.. the easiest test to do for witnessing firsthand what faster raid to raid transfers will do for your usage model is to set up a ramdisk and transfer typically used data between a raided SSD volume and that non-bottlenecked ramdisk volume. File transfers much below 1GB will go so fast that you rarely get to see the Windows transfer speed dialogue box popup. And files under 500MB will transfer almost in the blink of an eye without the transfer speed popup. Most people who do the test are blown away by the results and start building raids shortly thereafter.
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