Installed A SSD.

[hcap]

Last week after watching SSD prices continue to drop, bit the bullet and got a SANSUNG 850 EVO 1 tb drive. Did not want to reinstall everything after a fresh install of widows(7). Decided cloning although not the best, was the way to go. Already had Casper 8 for cloning and backup. Contacted Casper customer service who really helped. Had concerns about the raid 0 driver on my Dell XPS 8500, and Samsung strongly recommended the SSD to be used in an AHCI configuration. In fact warned me to not use raid 0 when I called them. Recommended I reset the bios.

Had major jitters after reading conflicting info about re-setting my Dell XPS 8500 bios to AHCI. The Dell came with a small 32 gb SSD on the motherboard. And the machine was pretty fast, using pre-fetching software from Intel. Which was why it was set up; in raid 0. Had my doubts I could clone successfully. However Casper said no problem.

Last thing I did before proceeding was to speak to an IT professional who installed all the SSDs for a company I used to work for and still write some programs for. His recommendation was simply after cloning switch the SATA cable my original hard drive was hooked to (SATA 0) to the new cloned SSD.

Everything worked fine in RAID 0.. Old hard drive is now an additional storage drive ( drive letter I) and the SSD is my new boot drive C.

The drive came with a propitiatory piece of software called Magician. Well worth it. Setting it in something called "RAPID mode"
Amazing jump in speed.

[Hoofless_Wonder]

SSD's are the nuts for PCs. My new desktop has two SSDs on it, one with Linux Ubuntu Studio and the other with evil Windows 10. I've configured them both at RAID 0 to maximize space. Both operating systems boot within 15 seconds.

I just worked on a contract for a customer in St. Louis who wanted to know the best config for NINE SSDs for their system, and we ended up going with RAID5 to maximize the space. The SSDs are reliable and it's worth the risk to only have a single spare. Unlike the older style drives, more spindles DOES NOT necessarily translate to faster i/o with SSD. Running the ioperf tool showed that quite clearly.

If you're going to run a system with RAID0 disks, you certainly need to make sure you have good backups. If the RAID0 disk is part of the operating system, then you need to make sure you have a clear and working bare metal restore procedure in place.

[hcap]

My primary goal was to extend the life of my 31/2 year old PC. No moving parts and a 5 year warranty. I was stuck using RAID 0. Did not want to do a fresh new install of widows 7 and load it with AHIC, redo all my settings and re-install my programs. My Dell bios is tricky. Was warned I could not do it easily in the bios. There is some info out there that I could change the RAID 0 drivers to AHIC by editing the registry after windows was already installed. Instead I cloned the SSD in RAID 0 and stayed with RAID 0 afterwards, yes and my backup is my old 2 TB hard drive. And after I find my USB 3 external hard drive I will have 2 backups

The SSD according to Samsung works faster using AHIC. Debatable.
I do vb a database stuff in Excel and it now flies. The AS-SSD benchmark is pretty damn good.

Unlike the older style drives, more spindles DOES NOT necessarily translate to faster i/o with SSD. Running the ioperf tool showed that quite clearly.

Where?

[headhawg]

Originally Posted by Hoofless_Wonder

SSD's are the nuts for PCs. My new desktop has two SSDs on it, one with Linux Ubuntu Studio and the other with evil Windows 10. I've configured them both at RAID 0 to maximize space. Both operating systems boot within 15 seconds.

How does RAID 0 maximize space exactly? RAID 0 is a performance option and with most configurations, one larger SSD will perform better than multiple SSDs in the RAID array especially if you're using SATA. But I don't understand how this maximizes space.

[hcap]

My use and testing shows Samsung's Magician does indeed speed things up.
Not on startup or opening programs, but in day to day use of reading and writing to files. When I first chose which SSD to use, my choice was between Sandisk and Samsung. The Magician software only works (they claim ) on their SSD's. My initial reason for Samsung was the 5 year vs 3yr warranty of Sandisk. But from what I read beforehand the Magician software sounded interesting.

Highly recommended.

One catch. You need ram. Probably not a good idea if you have 4 GB and you are planning heavy workloads.

Real world testing....

http://www.thessdreview.com/software...e-2-1-testing/

Samsung Magician 4.5 RAPID Mode – Evaluated With Demonstrated Speed Increase

"So in all, RAPID does indeed increase a system’s performance. In day to day usage start up and opening application times will not be affected, however, when it comes to actually working on projects, RAPID will help to speed things up."

[Hoofless_Wonder]

Originally Posted by headhawg

How does RAID 0 maximize space exactly? RAID 0 is a performance option and with most configurations, one larger SSD will perform better than multiple SSDs in the RAID array especially if you're using SATA. But I don't understand how this maximizes space.

RAID 0 capacity of the RAID "group". If you have five 500 GB drives, you can configure them:
http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

RAID 0 - 2500 GB capacity, 5 x read and write speed gain (versus a single drive), no drive loss tolerance - you lose a drive, you've lost all the data on that drive
RAID 1 - 1000 GB capacity in two dual drive configs of 500 GB each, 2 x read speed and no write speed gain, can lose a drive in either raid group, one drive unused
RAID 5 - 2000 GB capacity, 4 x read speed, no write speed gain, can lose a single drive

Note - these read and write performance numbers are for traditional spinning disks - but do NOT translate to SSDs, as there are no spinning platters and arms for i/o involved.

[Hoofless_Wonder]

Originally Posted by hcap

My primary goal was to extend the life of my 31/2 year old PC. No moving parts and a 5 year warranty. I was stuck using RAID 0. Did not want to do a fresh new install of widows 7 and load it with AHIC, redo all my settings and re-install my programs. My Dell bios is tricky. Was warned I could not do it easily in the bios. There is some info out there that I could change the RAID 0 drivers to AHIC by editing the registry after windows was already installed. Instead I cloned the SSD in RAID 0 and stayed with RAID 0 afterwards, yes and my backup is my old 2 TB hard drive. And after I find my USB 3 external hard drive I will have 2 backups

The SSD according to Samsung works faster using AHIC. Debatable.
I do vb a database stuff in Excel and it now flies. The AS-SSD benchmark is pretty damn good.
Where?

Your mileage can vary quite a bit with the raid levels, the drivers, the number of drives, the o/s, the firmware, the workload, etc. Here's an interesting thread on the topic:

https://community.spiceworks.com/top...-the-right-way

What I found is that with spinning drives, the math is pretty straight-forward to increase IOPS. We configured 2 TB SATA drives in 13 drive RAID groups to get decent performance, which was around 300 IOPS for a single drive, and 1500 IOPS for the group. This was presented to the Windows server host across HBAs from a Dell storage array.

Then we looked at SSDs connected via an internal 6 Gbps raid controller. Just one SSD (400 GB) returned about 28,000 IOPs. After creating a 9 drive RAID 5 group of SSDs, we saw the number of IOPS climb to about 51,000. This was using small 4K blocks for i/o. When we bumped that block size up to one meg, the IOPS dropped to about 4700.

I'm not sure if we hit a bottleneck with the single controller, of if there were other tweaks needed to bump up the performance. But since it was so much higher than with physical spinning drives, we were happy to move along to other issues.

On a side note, my desktop has a Samsung 250 GB SSD, and it's the nuts. Not sure if I can use the Magician tool with Linux. I'll have to check into that.

[headhawg]

Originally Posted by Hoofless_Wonder

RAID 0 capacity of the RAID "group". If you have five 500 GB drives, you can configure them:
http://www.raid-calculator.com/default.aspx

RAID 0 - 2500 GB capacity, 5 x read and write speed gain (versus a single drive), no drive loss tolerance - you lose a drive, you've lost all the data on that drive
RAID 1 - 1000 GB capacity in two dual drive configs of 500 GB each, 2 x read speed and no write speed gain, can lose a drive in either raid group, one drive unused
RAID 5 - 2000 GB capacity, 4 x read speed, no write speed gain, can lose a single drive

Note - these read and write performance numbers are for traditional spinning disks - but do NOT translate to SSDs, as there are no spinning platters and arms for i/o involved.

Um...I understand RAID. You haven't explained how you maximize space. If you have three 1 TB drives, you still have (roughly) 3 TB of space whether in RAID 0 or not in an array. How data is accessed may be different, but the capacity is the same. RAID 1 is mirroring, so you lose half of your effective space. In RAID 5 you lose the equivalent of 1/n capacity, where n is the number of drives in the array.

[Hoofless_Wonder]

Originally Posted by headhawg

Um...I understand RAID. You haven't explained how you maximize space. If you have three 1 TB drives, you still have (roughly) 3 TB of space whether in RAID 0 or not in an array. How data is accessed may be different, but the capacity is the same. RAID 1 is mirroring, so you lose half of your effective space. In RAID 5 you lose the equivalent of 1/n capacity, where n is the number of drives in the array.

Ah, I see the point of confusion. You're correct. RAID 0, in my mind, is not an array per se, though technically it is. It means each drive is on its own, whether mapped as physical to logical drives, or whether mapped as one larger "logical" drive/file system, where the data is stripped across multiple disks.

When I stated using RAID 0 to maximize space, I meant relative to other RAID levels (1, 5, 6, 10) which do provide protection against at least a single drive failure. Back in the good old days, RAID 0 was the "standard" for PCs since disk was so costly. Not so much any longer.

In my work, I occasionally recommend that customers use RAID 0 configurations to maximize space for certain applications - i.e., a backup caching pool where the data can be quickly recovered or "re-backed up". However I normally keep the configs down to single or dual drive "arrays" to avoid a larger data loss from the striping effect.

[headhawg]

Originally Posted by Hoofless_Wonder

Ah, I see the point of confusion...

Based on your posts, I think that your understanding of RAID is not where it needs to be if you're serving customers, imo. I am not going to turn this thread into a lesson on RAID as hcap started this thread touting the performance of his SSD and the Rapid Mode feature on the Samsung brands. I'll simply end my comments by stating that 1) SSDs are the best PC performance upgrade a person can do next to adding more RAM; 2) Samsung is arguably the best consumer-level brand of SSDs; 3) RAID configurations have nothing to do with maximizing drive capacity; and 4) the jury is still out regarding an increase in the performance of SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration.

Good luck.

[MJC922]

Did they ever get trim working on SSDs that are on RAID? Because of that I still buy spinning drives for RAID arrays and put them on RAID10. One thing to be wary of is on-board Intel RAID1, do not breathe any easier with that, I've seen corruption with it just this week in fact.

[hcap]

Originally Posted by MJC922

Did they ever get trim working on SSDs that are on RAID? Because of that I still buy spinning drives for RAID arrays and put them on RAID10. One thing to be wary of is on-board Intel RAID1, do not breathe any easier with that, I've seen corruption with it just this week in fact.

Yes Trim is enabled in Windows 7 and 8 whether RAID 0 or AHCI. I checked after I did the installation

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/276929-32-enable-trim

"To enable or disable TRIM Command, you will need to open an Elevated Command Prompt window.
How To Open an Elevated Command Prompt window: Click on Start Orb > Type "CMD.exe" in Search box > Right click on "CMD" and select "Run as Administrator" (If you receive a prompt confirmation, click YES)

How to Enable TRIM Command

In the Elevated command Prompt windows, type the following:

fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

[headhawg]

One thing about trim in Win7 (and this may apply to the later OS versions), it's unclear when it is run when using you have Windows installed on an SSD. It's supposed to wait for some idle time, but when is a Windows system drive inactive? For a best practice, I use the Samsung Magician's Performance Optimization feature about once per month on my system drive.

[Hoofless_Wonder]

Originally Posted by headhawg

Based on your posts, I think that your understanding of RAID is not where it needs to be if you're serving customers, imo. I am not going to turn this thread into a lesson on RAID as hcap started this thread touting the performance of his SSD and the Rapid Mode feature on the Samsung brands. I'll simply end my comments by stating that 1) SSDs are the best PC performance upgrade a person can do next to adding more RAM; 2) Samsung is arguably the best consumer-level brand of SSDs; 3) RAID configurations have nothing to do with maximizing drive capacity; and 4) the jury is still out regarding an increase in the performance of SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration.

Good luck.

I can't be held accountable if you can read for context, but if you think my knowledge is sub-par, you should be consulting in today's IT environment. I never stated that RAID configuration had anything to do with maximizing a drive's capacity (which of course is fixed), but the RAID configuration is quite important when it comes to the end array or array's capacity.

The example I've tried to provide is to simply point out that some of the old assumptions around RAID do NOT apply with SSD. One of the architects I work with wanted to create three RAID5 three drive arrays, which would have wasted 800 GB of overall capacity versus the single RAID5 array we went with after testing.

/sarcasm_on
But let's not allow for some practical real-world experience get in the way of no value add nitpicking....
/sarcasm_off

[headhawg]

I didn't nitpick; I asked legitimate questions because you were being vague, especially with regard to "space". I can't be held accountable for you being unclear. And if I really wanted to nitpick I would have asked to you explain these points:

"RAID 0 was the "standard" for PCs since disk was so costly" Huh? When did RAID 0 (or any RAID) become a standard for PCs? For gamers who wanted extra performance, maybe. But standard?? And RAID 0 is certainly not a standard in an enterprise environment because of the lack of fault tolerance.

"The example I've tried to provide is to simply point out that some of the old assumptions around RAID do NOT apply with SSD." Such as?

"One of the architects I work with wanted to create three RAID5 three drive arrays..." What "architect" would do that unless there was a compelling reason for it? Any reasonably competent IT person can do the math and determine the loss of drive space with three separate RAID 5 arrays vs. a single array.

I would have let this go but you made me reply to your veiled insults. Don't reply back; I've read enough. So has everyone else who has a clue.