HOW TO: Windows Installation Thread (includes SATA III, SSD Upgrade, RAID0 Discussion)

Yes, using the two outside as the middle is clearly labeled as Sata II. Not too fond of the idea of totally stripping this unit down and replacing the motherboard. Also, going through who knows how many dell tech's till they can realize the issue.

Update:
So, talking to Dell this morning. They refuse to troubleshoot the issue as the two SSD's are not bought from Dell but can send me to another department for 120 dollars (same department that was suppose to call me yesterday but did not) to troubleshoot the speed issue. Guess I didn't spend enough? So they scheduled a call back from this department for Monday. Any takers on a bet they won't call?

Update:
Can't leave well enough alone. Swapped the SSD places in the first and third, took out the 500 drive. Both are running 6gb's, put the 500 back in, both are running 6gb's. Not sure why...

Spoiler

 

That's odd, but at least its all working as it should do now, which is great! - you must be pleased also with those ATTO bench figures too, from what I could make out...

 

ya, I'll have to increase the screen shot size next time, that was my first post, experience with setting up spoilers and full screen shots. But yes, that was the performance I expected. It's very odd, going to keep my eye on it but I hope it's resolved.

 

I dont blame you for keeping an eye on things - I would be like a hawk too. It's a shame that Dell wont even troubleshoot Sata dropout unless you have stock Dell SSD's. I recall Bill saying this aswell but its been proven to NOT be the drives before....johnksss put his Vertex in another desktop system and they worked...put 'em in the R1 and nope.

FWIW, I use ImageShack Bulk Uploader for images - I find it pretty easy to use and it generates various links to post in forums. You can also resize your images very quickly if you want to.....worth a look.

 

I guess it's the chance you take when you don't buy from dell (ssd's) but the support I've had so far, I don't have a lot of confidence buying ssd's for twice the price from dell.

Ya, I could have re-imaged again but I'm at work, put the laptop back in the car and being lazy about bringing it back in and messing with it.

On the other hand, you pay the extra 120 and you get it back if theres an issue with the laptop if I understood correctly but if you made a mistake, you loose 120...

Make the ssd's comparable to 3rd party prices and I'll buy from dell next time.

 

Memory and Drives...the biggest profit area for Dell....They indeed should make prices more competitive as it could only be win-win for them. I lost track of the amount of times that I've said to someone considering a new purchase to "order stock drives and memory and upgrade them yourself later".......that's money Dell *could* be making if only they were a little more realistic - if they were, I am sure more people would buy these upgraded components from Dell at the outset and have ALL their hardware covered under the roof of one warranty.

 

You know, dealing with support (not the funnest thing) and knowing now they don't support and make things miserable, if it was a small mark up, I'm buy from them but twice the price, don't think so. Luckily I fixed this myself. Worse case scenario, I'd find the smallest, cheapest drive I can (if it's cheap), buy two (to set up raid for testing purposes) and make them fix it then. (which after looking at the cheapest drive, ocz 60 gig 90 bucks, like I said, spendy but I have a gift certificate with them, these might come in handy for testing purposes...)

 

It would not set well with me to have to pay extra for support because of having installed some of my own parts. But, I can totally understand why Dell/Alienware cannot and will not provide tech support involving issues with the hardware they did not sell. The list of scenarios they would need to troubleshoot that are not related to what they sold a customer would be endless. It could become very difficult for them to determine when a problem is related to aftermarket parts or the components they sold to a customer.

I just experienced a similar issue last night. I had ordered a second M4 SSD and went to install them last night to replace the Agility 3 RAID0 setup. And, guess what? The second M4 (on SATA port1 would not run at 6GB/s. I checked before creating the RAID0 membership just out of curiosity what I would find, as I remembered having this same issue initially with one M4. This was frustrating and puzzling because the 2 Agility 3 were running consistently at 6GB/s.

After trying several things and getting nowhere, as a last ditch effort before putting the Agility 3 SSDs back in place, I reset the BIOS to defaults, pulled out the CMOS battery for a few minutes, then changed all of my BIOS CPU settings back like I had them set before. To my pleasant surprise, I found both of the M4 SSD instantly were operating at 6GB/s. I have checked in RST probably 20 times in the past 18 hours, with at least 10 shut down/start-up sequences and both SATA port0 and port1 speeds have been a rock solid 6GB/s.

So, this makes me curious if something gets stuck or corrupted in the BIOS after changing out drives that prevents port0 and port1 from running at SATA 3.0 speeds concurrently. I'm still puzzled, but have no other explanation. But, whatever was the root causes, I am glad it is corrected.

Another thing that I changed was the Rapid Storage Technology service was set for a delayed start. I changed that to start normally, versus delayed. It improved my SSD benchmarks in 4k read/write speeds slightly.

 

I've noticed that RST is usually not running until you open it, I can set it to start at boot, i'll have to check and see if it's set to delay.

 

From my experience of RST, it takes a little while to load as a task tray icon and then takes a further minute or so until you get the service up and running with the "greentick". I havent made any changes to RST whatsoever and it always loads after a while and I have never (touch wood) experienced RST displaying anything other than 6gbps for my two drives....

Good logic though, Mr. Fox....hopefully your "FoxFix" for this problem would help others out in the future who come across this issue!

 

Well, here's how the Crucial M4 SSD RAID0 stacks up against the Agility 3 SSD RAID0. When it's all said and done, the M4 is clearly better handling incompressible data, especially so with sequential and 512k speeds, which many folks feel matters most in real world utilization. The Agility 3 smokes the M4 with compressible data, but we already expected good performance with incompressible data, as OCZ uses those numbers for advertisement purposes. WEI score with M4 is 7.9 and Agility 3 is 7.8, which I attribute to the M4 read access times being over twice as fast.

When all the chips are down, it looks like close to a draw. Now I am torn whether to go back to the double-capacity I had with the Agility 3 drives. The M4 "feels" a little faster, but that's subjective and may be tainted by my disappointment with the Agility 3 drives because of the semi-bogus advertised speeds using only compressible data.

Thought, comments? Help me make up my mind, Team. What would you do?

 

Stick with the M4, overall better drive and won't crap out on you (OCZ + SF = double whammy). Though odd, my OCZ drives always had crappy 4k scores, yours seem to beat the M4 by quite some margin, as I thought 4k scores were more indicative of real world usage.

 

m4's are more reliable as tsunade hime suggest...take it from me...who has had to rma over 30 ocz ssd's. and like a dummy....i bought the vertex 4 256 today... . and it comes needing a firmware update right out of the box.

but....

the ocz's will almost always be faster on over all scoring(depending on which drives you purchase). and for sure on writes.

side note...agiliy drives really arent that fast they have a low iops rating....
ill post what this vertex 4 gets in a few...

edit:
single vertex 4 drive
random first then zero fill

raid 0 vertex 3 max iops
random bottom then zero fill to the right.


i used the same image on both drives...looks like i might have to redo my v4 though...

 

With your M4 vs Agility 3 results above, do you have the Intel RST write-back cache enabled or disabled? Screenshot: http://puu.sh/xeHV

 

Thanks for the advice, guys. I was sold on the M4 to begin with and bought the OCZs against my better judgment because they were inexpensive - *facepalm at self* - And, I know you're both right on the money with the reliability of the M4 being better. I'm still leaning toward sticking with the M4 as suggested. What made me pause and ask for input is how wildly different they are in benchmarks and having twice the drive space is still attractive. As far as performance, they exchange blows on different measurements in ways that are very dissimilar.

namaiki - the write-back cache has been enabled with both installations. Also, both installations are with a 16k stripe and 16k cluster size. I tried different stripe and cluster sizes and read/write speeds seemed to be consistently higher with both at 16k. Both installations are with RST 11.1.0.1006.

 

i got you beat with a single drive....at least one test...

 

I think speeds look reasonably fast for both drive configurations.

If it were me, I'd probably stick with the Agility 3s for the extra space. (note: I haven't owned any OCZ drives, though I have heard the horror stories)

If you don't need the (extra?) space or if you feel like you can't trust OCZ, then get rid of them and stick to the M4s. I must say, the M4s do seem to be a lot more reliable.

 

Yes, having the extra drive space makes the decision more difficult. Other than the lousy read access times, the Agility 3 has not given me any problems. I could easily fill the 256GB RAID0 beyond its capacity with my Steam games alone, which are currently installed on my 750GB HDD for that reason. I had them installed on the SSD RAID0 array with the OCZs.

 

kind of why i broke my raid...i would rather have 512 gigs of ssd space and my dvd burner drive back in. then used another 256 ssd for esata.

 

Anyone tried the new 11.5 RST that were supposed to enable RAID-0 on SSDs? The software is on BETA, so no stable release yet.

www.station-drivers.com • Afficher le sujet - driver: Intel Rapid Storage Technology Ver: 11.5.0.1153 beta

 

Bro,

I think I would personally stick with the Crucial M4's - sure, the sequential compressible reads are super high on the Agility Raid but that's to be expected with a sandforce controller - not that important in real world useage though, right?

The only downside for you, my friend, is being torn between the capacity - if you can handle the smaller Raid, its a no brainer....If you wanted the larger size, I'd kinda be tempted to maybe even think of selling all of 'em and going "balls out" for a M4 512gb Raid....sorry to throw another spanner in the works!

Several of us are running the desktop version of RST found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...logy-11-1-0-1006-ssd-raid0-trim-support.html# and it appears to be working well. Just a case of waiting for Intel to roll out the legit mobile version now.....

 

I would go with the RAID Agility's plainly because as boot drives, they work well as most of the info is compressible. Then I would stick the M4's in an external USB 3.0/esata RAID bay for data etc.

You get the best of both worlds then, large space for programs etc and decent performance and also the incompressible performance of the M4's doesn't go to waste.

 

Thanks for the additional feedback, everyone. Much appreciated... All good points offered as food for thought.

Hey Brother Pat, yes I did use those drivers. I had two issues with them: BSOD and my 750GB data drive was being misidentified as a removable device and showed up in the "Safely Remove Handware" system tray icon. As Steve pointed out, several of us are using the 11.1.0.1006 with good results. All indications are that the TRIM commands Windows is passing to the array is being used because both the Agility 3 and M4 arrays on my system have shown improved speeds over time, and I do not allow much, if any, idle time for GC to work. Before installing RST 11.1.0.1006, the Agility 3 array was growing progressively slower.

 

My preference would be to use Intel SSDs if you have to have the performance of a SandForce drive. Really the only way I would do that. Way to many horror stories about them since coming out. You have the 520 and 330 drives to choose from.

OCZ is concerned with one thing, market share. Just look at how confusing their product line up is. They have a history of shoddy firmware and a very high failure rate. Also, as I think John mentioned, IOPS are what really matter. The agility drives look like a good value for a reason, they are handicapped in IOPS and lower binned parts to get price down. So while they give good bench numbers for throughput, as soon as they are taxed they will choke and do much lower in real use.

And 4K numbers are more indicative of real-world usage for an OS drive. Sequential would only represent real-world if this was a storage drive only being used to read or write large files all the time.

At the end of the day, any SSD is fast. The margin between the top 20% of them is miniscule. Due to that, I decided 2 things: First off, RAID is a waste unless you are obsessed with benchmarking (it will not boost your 4k numbers at all since stripe sizes don't go small enough); and secondly, reliability is way more important to me than topping a storage benchmark chart (everyone only cares about 3D benches anyways )

For those reasons...I only have Intel SSDs. I have like 7 of them now lol

 

Well, short of spending more money, it's too late for Intel SSD. I own a pair of M4 and a pair of Agility 3, so that is all I have to work with at the moment. In 20/20 hindsight (and on my next SSD purchase) I will likely bite the bullet and let my wallet hemorrhage for a single 512GB SSD. The blunder this go round was allowing myself to be enticed by the inexpensive cost of acquisition on the Agility 3 SSDs. I knew better and did it anyway. I'm not a teenager any more, so I am without excuse on that one, LOL.

So, for now I think I might end up going with the majority and my own gut instincts and stick with the M4 RAID0 set up. I agree with scook9 that RAID0 SSD is more about benchmarking numbers rather than everyday benefit. Although, the contiguous drive space does offer an advantage when small capacity like my pair of M4 128GB is involved in the decision. The 256GB RAID0 array is large enough to serve my needs for the boot drive, but one is simply not enough space.

The Agility 3 SSD drives will not go to waste. They will have a home in two other systems among my family of laptops (Inspiron M5030 and the M17x R2 most likely).

I'm not concerned about data loss with RAID0, as I already image my OS drives and have my important data backed up to external drives and/or cloud storage. Everything that is resident locally is expendable if disaster should strike.

 

I am using an Intel 520 180GB currently, loving the larg(ish) size and the price is NOT crazy in my mind....(like $270)

I still remember paying $500 for my first SSD in 2009 lol (Corsair x128)

 

Few things not mentioned here that can be important.

Even with the new RST drivers there is no TRIM Passed to the SSD (or any drive) in the array. The drivers allow for TRIM to be passed to drives on the controller in RAID mode, but not to the drives in the array. This means if you go with SSD RAID solution you will be relying on the garbage collection of the SSD drive firmware it self.

Anandtech is to my knowledge the only review site to give you a detailed breakdown of dirty drive performance and its ability to restore itself. Trust me, go check out any drive reviewed there before you buy for SSD RAID, you will be shocked at how poor most drives handle this. Unfortunately (and I am not happy saying this) Sandforce is one of the better garbage collection SSDs.

I have had or own now:
OCZ Agility 120GB (current in my older MSI GT735)
OCZ Vertex 2 240GB (was in my ASUS G73jh)
OCZ Revo 3 240GB (current Desktop boot and main drive)
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB (current Game drive in desktop)

OCZ is much better then most companies for firmware, but the issue with Sandforce is no more their fault then any other OEM using it. Sandforce is not that great at fixing issues. Though I have had none of the reported issues my self.

My next SSD for my laptop (currently its between a Clevo or Alienware) will be either a OCZ Vertex 4 (this is a in house design to OCZ) or Samsung PM830. Its a tough call, but right now Samsung has an edge but OCZ has a new firmware coming for their Everest 2 controller.

I have had zero issues with any of my OCZ drives, in fact the only issue is I have a very early Agility one with NAND not compatible with the latest firmware, but its not a huge deal, it didnt add anything I do not have all ready that I needed.

Also OS files are very compressible so Sandforce makes a decent mSATA boot drive, which maybe my next setup, with a SSD+HD for applications and storage.

 

Exmortis, I think you need to have a read of this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...logy-11-1-0-1006-ssd-raid0-trim-support.html#

The elevated command prompts show that the TRIM command is getting passed to the drives - Intel SSD Toolbox shows that the drives are ready to receive the command also (I checked each of my drives in my array and both returned the same results)....Ive been running this desktop version for a while now and although it is for desktop's, I havent noticed any drive degradation. I think its highly unlikely that Intel would release a version of RST claiming it supports Raid for SSD's and it actually is not doing so.....we just have to wait for it to be officially rolled out for the mobile platform. In the meantime, this works just fine.....

BTW, the Vertex 4 is only "in-house" because OCZ bought Indilinx - not because OCZ did anything different, other than acquiring Indilinx for the controller

 

So, still getting the 6GB/s on both drives in raid, seems like the issue was taken care of, here's the punch line, not by Dell. As I previously mentioned, they were suppose to call this morning, of course, no call (I mentioned to them, it's a holiday, they said they knew and would call). Funny, one of my justifications for picking up the newest model was for the support (video card, ivy, HM77, three HD bay) and so far, it's been a lack of or sorry, you didnt spend enough to get the support you want. Hope it gets better from here.

 

no worries brother fox, you can still sell either set. and at the end of the day they are both fast...just the m4 is a bit more reliable than ocz. ocz has a lot of controller error failer over anything else. it's like if you have any type of power serge.....the drive give out. haven't had a problem with my maxiops and just got the vertex 4. ocz does honor it's warranty, but damn....who wants to use a warrany in the first 30 days....but if you leave them in place. (in system) they should work fine and dandy...


as to the vertex 4...i can add that you need that firmware right off the bat...if you want compressible data speeds to go up...
as to 4k...the numbers i have posted can give an example of how ocz is coming along now. their random and non random fill numbers are pretty close to even, while beating out a few raid setups as well...they can thank indilinx for that...even without the update...the numbers for 4k are still pretty close to the same.

 

Yes, but we are in a "Dell" forum speaking about "Alienware", how is that any different?

End ofd the day, almost no large successful company has arisen to where they are now with out aquisitions. Its the way of things.

I am a fan of OCZ, their forums are some of the best, with some of the most helpful mods. Corsair is another good one as well, but I own none of their SSDs.

As a Revo owner, I am very hopeful that the newest drivers do indeed pass TRIM, how ever the Revo seems to have excellent GC, since I am still now near new performance, and I have secure erased and reloaded on this drive 3 times. And wont be long before I do so again, I go through about 2-3 mobos a year thse days.

 

So what ended up fixing the issue with SATA speed being at 3GB/s with the HDD in along with the RAID SSDs?

I will be doing the same thing but with 2x128GB Samsung 830 from Dell.

 

I am also curious to hear what tanderson did, if it was different than what worked for me.

As far as more than two SATA ports functioning at 6GB/s, that is not possible based on Intel's documentation. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge (at least on mobile platforms) appear to only support a maximum of two SATA ports at SATA 3.0 6GB/s.

Intel® BD82HM77 PCH Specs - Intel® BD82HM76 PCH Specs

 

I was thinking since I had all three drives, I removed the 500 GB drive, so I was working with just the two drives on the 6GB channels. Then I checked in the bios and I'm pretty sure I just saved settings. I did not reset the bios defaults but saving might just have triggered both drives working properly. But I think your way fox, resetting bios defaults, removing the cmos battery (not sure where that is in this laptop) for a period of time, putting it back in (I would still suggest to start with just two drives in raid before you add a third (if your using 7mm or want to cram 9.5 drives in there, good luck), get that working properly and then add the 500 GB drive, which is close to what I did.

 

Good idea of using just two drives to start with, then adding the third into the mix after the SATA 3.0 RAID0 array is all set up.

 

I went into this version knowing that the HM77 would only support two 6GB/s sata drives as stated by intel.

 

Okay, cool I was just thinking of having the 2 SSD in RAID 0 working first then wipe my 500gb drive and hook it up in the middle slot to use as a storage drive. But knowing that what worked I'll definately do that first. Thanks

 

Secure Erase set the drive to like-new performance better than TRIM would.....means this is not a good example of GC at work

 

Very true, it was more a statement that I have had alot of experience with the drive in varying systems, AMD and INTEL in fact.

I kinda lied though, it was secure erased several times in a row when I moved to INTEL from AMD, but in short succession, INTEL chipsets are absolutely terrible, and I got dead CPU and board failed soon after (could be related, or I would guess it is). I would give anything to run 990FX chipset with my i7 CPU. Not to mention failed SATA ports before that, which prompted new board.

A laptop revo solution would totally rock, mPCIE card raid0 SSD. Course Revo is NOT cost effective by any means, and really probably not really worth the money, but with only 2 6G SATA III on intel chipset, and add-ons do not perform as good, it has been a great solution for me.

I personally wouldn't go SSD RAIDO on a laptop, especially now with mSATA options, which are really great, and cost effective. What ever I end up buying will have a large 256GB+ SSD with a 500GB HD.

If I was to recommend, Id go 60GB mSTATA boot, and a pair of 7200rpm drives RAID0, as long as you back up those drivers regularly.

 

Little different direction. I've been running Mushkin for little under a year with Sanforce controller and I've always defended them, not sure why, I've had a 50/50 failure rate for new drives from them.

This time around, I sold the Mushkin, had a bad experience with the second set and went with a different brand. I was going to go with the samsung 830 (says samsung controller?) for one because of the size. I was comparing drives in the 7mm range as I learned that the 9.5mm mushkins were huge when trying to place drives in the new R2.

So I was looking at samsung 830 and plextor m3 pro using the marvell controller, went with plextor for the better read/write speeds and iops.

Sometimes I pull the trigger quick and hopefully this pans out.

Size note, my crazy thinking, the two ssd's give me little under 500GB for OS and 500GB Hitachi for data. I like the option of the large SSD drive to keep the amount of space used down as you hit 80% on the SSD's you've got issues, theres my justification for two SSD's. Plus, you go up to 512GB SSD's, most are slower than the 256GB drives.

 

Interested in the m3p raid 0, any benches?

 

I had the ATTO in my other post where I had issues setting up raid when I just go the drives, pic's a little small.

Spoiler

 

OK, I can't believe I can't figure this out.

Doing a fresh Windows 7 x64 install. RAID volume created via BIOS. Windows setup says it can't find a drive to install to and prompts for a driver. I picked up the F6 drivers for the Intel RST (both 10.8 and 11.1), and copied the files to the root of a USB flash drive. I browse to the flash drive, and it shows that "Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA RAID controller" driver is there. I choose it and click "Next". The progress bar goes and goes and then says no devices found.

Jeeez. I don't remember, in the past, having a problem with this, so not sure why it's being so difficult now.

Ideas?

ps. I tried 11.1 first, then when that didn't work, I deleted the files from the USB drive and copied the 10.8 files to it. I didn't have both on there simultaneously.

 

Are you installing windows from a bootable USB?

 

Does your Windows 7 x64 disc have SP1? If it doesn't, get a proper Windows 7 disc with SP1 on it, that should fix your issues installing Windows 7 on a RAID configuration.

If you need the ISO with SP1, you can find it here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows-os-software/604187-legal-download-digitalriver-windows-7-sp1-13-languages.html

 

Yes. Windows 7 x64 w/SP1

 

Yes, it is a Windows 7 with SP1.

 

Apparently, the install USB drive has to be in the USB ports on the right side, not the left.

I changed and it works fine.

 

Yup. Left side USB 3.0 - right side USB 2.0 - OS will only install from a USB 2.0 port as the USB 3.0 drivers wont be there yet until after the USB 3.0 driver is installed after the OS - at least that's my take on things....

 

I made that same mistake the first time, not knowing the USB 3.0 ports on the left side don't work without drivers.

There is also a much easier way to RAID. Just install Windows to one SSD with the BIOS set to RAID. After installing Windows to one SSD, install RST and create the RAID0 array within Windows using RST. Super easy operation and no need to dink around with F6 drivers. That's the only way I do it any more, 'cause it's so much easier. Once the RAID0 conversion is done, simply go to the Disk Management utility, right click on C: and select "Extend volume" and use up any unallocated space.

For some reason we had 3 discussions going all at the same time on the subject of RAID. Merged them with the thread in the main forum, because it's almost all information that can benefit the whole Community. (A few things specific to M18x, but not much.)