Crucial M4 64gb raid or no raid?

[Stealth3si]

I am not adamant about running raid but it would be a bonus if I could, then I would.

 

Please try to answer in descending order if possible at your convenience. Thank you.

 

1.) I'm a raid virgin and was wondering what are the pros and cons of raiding a pair of these with Asus M5A88-V EVO and AMD 960T?

 

2.) I have heard there would be no TRIM support so there would be performance degradation. Over time how would I know through benchmark tests if performance have significantly degraded?

 

3.) The SSDs would also be eventually need to be erased to regain performance but can I create weekly image backups from the raid setup onto an HDD and restore it when it gets slow?

 

4.) My current M4 64GB SSD has win 7 64-bit OS on it right now and I make weekly image backups. Can I add another M4 64GB to create a raid without having to re-install windows or buy a hardware raid card?

 

5.) Is it worth it and if so what raid configuration should I do?

 

6.) Anything else I should know?

[bigball1]

1. OCC Raid Guide

 

2. No Trim in raid. Garbage collection yes. All l do is do a benchmark every 6 months or so to see my speeds. And i have never had any speed drop over the 2 years now i have been running SSD Raids.

 

3. If there are any speed drops all you have to do is do a secure erase on the drive and it will be back to normal. That will erase the drive so you just reload your image back to it.

 

4. I have never created a raid from a image so i dont know about how to do that will the drivers imbedded in your image. Your MB supports raid so no card is needed.

 

5. Raid 0 is the only raid that is really worth it if your going to do SSD Raids.

 

6. Helps if you get the same drive and also you have to make sure that they are running the same firmware

[wevsspot]

BB hit all of the high points right on target. You can create an image from RAID0 drives, as well as copy an image onto a RAID0 array. The only thing I'm unsure of is partition alignment once you've completed a secure erase on the SSD(s). Windows 7 does the alignment automatically during the installation, so not sure if you would need to perform a manual alignment before copying the image over to your new array since you're technically not doing a fresh install.

[bigball1]

BB hit all of the high points right on target.

 

[Stealth3si]

Thanks.

 

Now, I'm deciding between raiding this or getting a single 128GB SSD.

[wevsspot]

RAID..RAID..RAID...

[wormy]

RAID..RAID..RAID...

 

 

I approve this post, I love my ssd raid setup

[Stealth3si]

would the 128 gb noticeably increase the random write speed so that it would take considerably shorter amount of time to save a 4 MB paint file to disk? I know the seq write is almost twice and that is for large file writes to the disk. But would this also improve my file-saving time? This it the primary reason I'd upgrade to 128gb.

[Waco]

4 MB? That's not big enough to notice much difference at all.

[Stealth3si]

you know how long it takes for the 64GB SSD to write a 4mb file to disk? 20seconds. it takes the same amount of time for a 500gb HHD to write this 4 mb file. go figure....my conjecture is that each layer takes like a quarter to half a second to save. Well my file has like 50 + layers. 50 x .25-.5 = 12.5 to 25 seconds!

 

if the 128gb improved seq writes make it less to around 10 seconds that would be a huge difference.

[Waco]

If you didn't see a change from a HDD to an SSD then going to a RAID array will get you nothing.

[Stealth3si]

what about going to 128gb with nearly 2x faster sequential writes?

Edited March 14, 2012 by Stealth3si