G51 with SSD Raid O

Hey all,

I have been thinking hard about what I want to do next with my computer, and decided to go with a new HDD. Of course, the best performing HDD nowadays are those fabled SSD drives! So why not make it a Raid setup and really fly!

This is the drive that I am looking at right now. For $150 I think it is a great deal! 230 read, 180 write speeds are fine for me.

Plus this in a Raid 0 setup would in theory be very fast. I am also thinking of running Windows 7, but I am not sure of that yet.

Just wanted to know what you guys think and if there are any better options?

 

From what I've been reading, just having one of them is amazing. RAID 0 sounds like it would just be overkill, at least for regular use and gaming, etc.

Personally, I would rather just get one, top out my performance there, and use the 320GB 7200rpm drive for storage and most of my writes.

 

MUAHAHAHA I JUST BOUGHT THEM!

Yes, it will be overkill, but then again, I want to try it out! Ill just throw my 320gb into a external enclosure.

 

LOL! Are you going to be running Windows 7?

Try and throw us some benchmarks when you get them set up, let us know how they run!

 

I think W7 is more optimized for them so probably. I am just not sure if all the drivers from the CD work with W7...hopefully!

 

I couldn't even run my drivers disc on 7...You have to take each individual driver and install them, and some of them don't work well with 7. Power4Gear doesn't even come up with the touch button key anymore. Thats one thing I hope Asus makes a little easier with 7...

But as far as most everything else, nothing had any trouble running otherwise. Things like the keyboard hotkeys ran perfectly out of the install.

 

Ok cool! I dont even run Power4Gear on my comp now. I am really looking forward to seeing what kind of performance these little guys can do!

Moo, are you running W7 now?

 

Win7 is / will be optimized for SSD. Win7 can detect most SSDs, but it may not detect them all (just yet). Weather you are on Vista or XP or Win7, make sure you do some manual optimizations to ensure proper performance and extend the life of your SSD(s):
- Disable (and never) run a disk defrag. Disable the Auto-defrag.
- I am not sure if the Trim command is enabled in Win7 yet, or even if your SSD will accept it. Read up on it here (and the next 2 pages). Overall, that is a good article to read btw.
- Disable / Do not use hibernation. This write extreme amounts of data to your SSDs which will slowly fill it up. As your SSD gets close to being full, it will slow down to noticeable amounts (but still faster than HDDs). I do not mean full by the conventional standards of using 75gb of an 80gb drive, but full in that nothing in an SSD is erased until the drive is full, only marked for the ability to be over-writted. An erase is very expensive, in computing time, on the SSD, and is not done until the drive is full. Read the above article for more detail.
- Since you will not have a regular HDD for the page sys file, I am not sure if disabling it all together is the best bet or to just reduce the size of it. Some applications may cause issues if there is no page sys file, perhaps someone else can expand more on this. Normally though, you would just move the page sys file away from the SSD (where Windows is installed) to another HDD.


~snake

 

Thanks a lot snake! I found this program that someone made, looks like it will take care of a lot of things. Also, with a new firmware update, those drives do support TRIM.