M17x R4 Storage configuration

I just got a replacement laptop from dell on my way, though the HD7970 is on back order which put my laptop 2 weeks behind shipping scheduled

Am going to order a few ssd's and hard drive, I also noticed the laptop has Msata and am thinking of removing the optical drive to put a HDD caddy.
So there's alot of option's on drive configuration and my head is going circles on what I should get lol
what type of configuration could I go with? can the laptop do Raid 5?

 

My sig tells my current config: Primary & OS on my Kinsgton SSD and two 750GB WD Scorpio Blacks in RAID 0 for storage.

I just made the jump from optical drive to 3rd hard drive. Some of my friends ask why not go with 2 x 1TB drives for storage?
I answer with this: 1TB notebook drives are still not reliable enough yet. They tend to be noisy and make weird clicking sounds...plus I haven't found a 1TB that's 7200 RPM and 9.5mm high. What I am hoping for is that my two 750GB drives get me thru another year or two and by then, there will be some good options for 1TB notebook drives out there.

As far as setting up a RAID 5 array in your system...it's possible, in theory. You would need to change out the optical drive for a HDD, and would need to plug an external drive into the eSATAp port. As far as the mSATA's go, there have been mixed results. Search around the forum and some peoplw will say their mSATA has been working great, other will warn the mSATA cards aren't worth the raw copper in them. So that one is definitely YMMV.

 

You only need 3 drives for RAID 5, so you wouldn't need an external, although I don't know if the controller supports it. I don't really understand why you would want to do it anyway, though. Even if it is supported, I bet it would be slow.

OP, what is your goal?

 

Good catch. The wiki article on RAID 5 is deceiving...or at least the picture is.

Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

thanks for all the insight guys.

My main goal is for data redundancy with 3x ssd in raid 5 if possible, I would use the msata as a boot drive. Still thinking on how I should approach my drive purchase, My guess I would get 3x Samsung 830 256GB( will switch out the optical a course) stick them in a raid 5 if possible but now am not sure which Msata drive to get.

 

De nada. Not sure with the best route to go with mSATA. Neither of the m17x's I maintain have 'em. A quick google search led to Amazon.com: OCZ Technology 120 GB Nocti Series 3.0 Gb-s Slim mSATA SATA II Solid State Drive (NOC-MSATA-120G): Electronics. OCZ Vertex 4 has great reviews, so we'll have to see which direction their mSATA line continues in.

 

I pretty sure the integrated RAID controller only supports RAID 0 and RAID 1, anyway, and the mSATA slot is only SATA2. Plus RAID 5 has a higher write penalty than RAID 0 or 1. Another thing to keep in mind is that as of right now, TRIM is not supported in RAID, so you will have some performance degradation of any SSD when operating SATA in RAID mode. Intel's new desktop RST driver supposedly does support TRIM, though, so that may be coming to the mobile chipsets sometime soon, as well. My recommendation would be to use AHCI instead of RAID because that will give you the best performance from your SSD, and use a 2.5" SSD instead of mSATA. If you really need redundancy, you have several options. You could use the mSATA for the OS and create a 2 drive RAID 1 array with the (2) 2.5" drive bays, you could use the mSATA drive to accelerate a RAID 1 array containing your OS and data using Intel SRT, or you could remove the optical bay and use s 2.5" SSD plus a 2 drive HDD RAID 1 array.

 

I actually am not sure that the msata is only SATA 2- I also was under the same impression BUT running HWinfo on my r4 lists the msata as being 6Gbit/s - which is of course sata3. Anecdotally, I installed win7 on both the msata 830 and the ssd Samsung 830- with no appreciable load or performance time difference.

 

Could you run a benchmark? I'd like to know if I've been giving people incorrect info.

It shows the actual port as 6Gbps and not just the drive?

 

Intel RST usually tells it like it is. Optical drive are reported as 1.5 Gbps, HDD's 3 or 6 Gbps, etc.

If/when you get your SSD's and if you buy an mSATA along with it, you can try setting up a RAID 5 array in Windows. I agree with Antipathy, I think the SATA controller may only do RAID 0 and 1. But if you get the OS installed on the mSATA, you can try setting up your RAID 5 partition in Windows 7. The Windows Disc Management Console gives that option, just right click on any unallocated disk partition. You will need to have the multiple drives present for that option to be available.

 

Great idea actually. Here is the hwinfo screen which led me to wonder about this


So I ran crystal disk on the msata


And for comparison the sata3 830 raid 0 SSD in my m17x


And... the m4 in my m11x


So it seems fairly obvious, it is performing at sata2 indeed and not sata3. Sorry for any confusion!

 

Awesome, thanks for doing this!