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SSDs in RAID 0


tejens23

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RAID0 does work with SSDs, but there are theoretical technical reasons why you shouldn't do it.

My guess is that beyond 2 current gen SSD drives In RAiD0 you wouldn't see much improvement in performance at all.

With current transfer rates at 280Mb/s sustained read - the bottlenecks will lie elsewhere.

The issue of performance degradation (not sure how real it is in a practical sense) is potentially worse in RAID.

Also - if you do set them up in RAID0 - it might be worth researching the stripe size - depending on your particular drive.  Too small - and you will create a partial read/ partial write scenario which will (theoretically at least) degrade performance.

On my drives I can't remember off-hand what the stripe size is - but there was significant differences in Burst and Sustained speeds reported for different stripes.

TRIM is not fully implemented yet - and unless it is completely implemented "on-drive" it will not work on a RAID array - at least not with the current crop of RAID chipsets.

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Yes .. very impressive.

However, consider this:

Any member of that RAID array failing would bring with it total volume failure. With 24 member disks - the chance of a volume failure is 24 times that.

Performance degradation (not something I've seen in my SSD RAID array, by the way) is said to be enhanced over time by a RAID array.

The video is made by a company that makes SSD's - and would be very pleased if you bought more than one of them (especially if you bought 24).

2Gb/sec of transfer speed will no doubt be lovely for FSX - but I don't think will equate with "instant" performance.

Cost.

Of course if money is no problem ... I'd be very inerested to see some information on a multi-drive RAID0 array using current gen SSDs and how FS performs with it.

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What are the read/write speeds of classic hard drives?

I know the the velociraptors in RAID 0 can reach read speeds of up to 195mbps and write speeds around 175mbps.  But if you only have one, it can reach read and write speeds of up to 130mbps.  So I'm assuming conventional HDDs or the classic ones are probably capable of reaching read and write speeds of about 70mbps.

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Here are some EVEREST Disk BenchMark comparison Screenshots of My System (Spec's in Sig) running  2 x 120gig OZC Vertex SSD's in Raid 0 with a Stripe Block size of 128K for My FlightSim Drive, and  2 x 300gig Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS in Raid 0 with a Stripe Block size of 128K for My General Games Drive.

2 x 120gig OZC Vertex SSD's in Raid 0 (128K Stripe)

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2 x 300gig VelociRaptor's  in Raid 0 (128K Stripe)

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I have flashed the OCZ Vertex SSD's with Firmware 1.41 from OCZ, and use PerfectDisk 10 and AS Cleaner 0.5 once a month to maintain high performance from the SSD's.

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They're impressive speeds aren't they.

Disk Bench utilities seem to show tha each drive almost adds its Read speed in RAID0 arrays with SSD's.  This (although slower) is the case with my 1st gen drives also.

How does it equate in terms of load times for FSX (for example), though.

The figures quoted for Standard drives (about 70 - 80 Mb/sec) sound about right.

I'm not sure how much of an issue partially written blocks are.  My RAID array of SSDs has not dropped performance significantly over a year of use, and no specific maintenance.

The newer OCZ drives will have Onboard fully managed TYrim or equivalent ... and the PCI-X drives will no doubt come down to a reasonable level at some stage.  No doubt in a few years ... mechanical HDDs will be museum pieces.

Cassette tapes anyone?

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