M17x Raid 0 SSD =)

Okay i know this has beaten down like a dead horse but i like to bring this topic up. I know the M17x has horrible SSD performance and i dearly miss my M15x but i am still a believer in SSD. Sooo....I got a second 60gb sandforce drive and toss it into my m17x and redid the complete setup. My ex-m15x still rocks and was a awesome setup for just a single drive. The m17x packs more power for the dual drive setup but i expected much more from it and very saddened that the chipset issues is what is truly holding back all the power. In reality this setup is WIckED Fast and i love it and plan to ditch the newly installed bluray drive for maybe ummmm... a 1TB drive and couple 60gb SSD...Drooollz.

Boot: Vertex II 60gb
Secondary: Phoenix pro 60gb



M15x



Laptop Forums and Notebook Computer Discussion



M17x raid 0 Dual sandforce drives

 

2 of these drives 64gb SSD in raid 0 and you will be flying. $110 each sandforce controller


Newegg.com - A-DATA S599 AS599S-64GM-C 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

The speed of that RAID setup is...well...insane. That's only 128GB before formatting, and that's just not enough space. Would be really cool if these laptops had that 3rd HDD slot though. Then you could just throw a large capacity standard HDD for storage.

 

i want to do the optical caddy swap and just use the bluray burner as external when i feel the need for optical disks. Even a 500gb 7.2krpm with dual 64gb ssd would be nuts and i do not take the laptop out much so the external optical does not bother me much. I might have to sleep on this and see how much i use the optical drive. I was not bothered by it when i had the m15x and will more than likely go through with it when i swap in the 920xm.


http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...drive-hdd-caddy-installation-56k-warning.html

 

Why isn't 128GB enough if all you will be doing is playing games?

 

You're kidding right? Games can take 10-20gb each depending on the game. More space per game than movies, more than music, more than pictures, more than disk images or anything else that I can think of. I have 150gb in games on my drive right now and thats only 7 normal games, emulators, and then all my steam games. I consider myself a light gamer since I don't play all the time and only have a small portion of my games installed at any one time (just the ones I'm currently playing). Heck if I had them all installed I would have several TB in games I bet.

I would never consider installing a game, play it, remove it, install a different game, play it, remove it, reinstall game #1 etc.

 

I don't know why it's not considered. That's exactly what I have been doing for years. Why keep, say Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed after you finished the games? Only games you play online you wanna keep. And for most people I assume having MW2, BFBC2, SC2 are good enough. One plays more than that one either is making money with gaming or seriously need to go out more often.

PS: I'm having Windows 7 Home, Office 2010, and bunch of small applications installed in my 60GB SSD. Now after putting in ME2, Crysis and BFBC2 it still has 17% left.

 

Here is some benches of me running Garbage Collection overnight by putting the computer to sleep and resuming but leaving the computer at the login screen overnight. It only takes a couple hours but i set it to GC and fell asleep lolz.

I see a jump in performance from my initial benches so this is a good sign. I will do a same GC cleanup in a week and see the results.

 

Because playing games is not all I use this laptop for. Movies, music, all kinds of other stuff. I only have an 80GB SSD, and I'm always playing the 'swap' game with my installs. I even run older, less demanding games from my secondary mechanical drive. It sucks. My next SSD will be no smaller than a 256GB. In theory, yes, it works. Realistically, it's a pain in the butt.

 

How exactly did you do that? I mean, all you need is resuming your sleeping M17x to log in screen, leave it like that and GC will do its job?

I'm having an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB too.

 

Why do you bother putting movies and music and "all kinds of other stuff" into an SSD in the first place? Especially when your M17xR2 has 640GB 7,200RPM Samsung Spinpoint as secondary. There is no benefit (well ok, very little) of running those stuff from SSD.

 

I talked about it in this thread and it is mainly for Raid setups but it will work on any sandforce drive. Raid can't rely on trim but it will still take advantage of GC. I think GC runs all the time but to manually trigger it you need to do as i described. Check out the links they take you straight to OCZ and explain how you can used Raid SSD as long as you manually trigger GC. If you have Trim enabled and let it to GC weekly or when ever you notice a performance drop you will get good results but don't be running benchmarks like crazy they will kill your drive

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6795828-post11.html

 

Yeah, I am thinking the same. One drive for boot and few games, other for the rest. Otherwise, buying 256GB SSD, it ends up being a bit more expensive.

 

I have been using the raid setup for a while now and just today ran couple benchmarks so i can leave it overnight to do a Garbage cleanup. I was amazed and was expecting to see lower speeds than when i did a clean install but seems like my speeds have gone up and i have almost loaded up the SSD and done no maintenance to the drive. This is a Benchmark before i have triggered GC and i hope once i leave it overnight it will bump up a little more. Alienware does not seem to have been doing any sort of fix for the 4k issue and that is the only thing holding back from unleashing the BEAST.

 

I'm actuallt new to this whole SSD set-up. I have 2x256 set up in RAID0 and it seems to work awsome to me!

 

I have two of them Vertex 2's in my desktop. The sandforce controller seems much better. I had a corsair P128 and that think dragged after a re-install of windows.

 

SCOOK and DR650 please post up your raid 0 ssd benchmarks to make it easier for people to find them. I am going to post up a benchmark of a single 500gb Segate Momentus XT.


Momentus XT



http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/543537-seagate-momentus-xt-ssd-hybrid-drives.html