Raid Guide

Are there any good raid setup guides out there? Can somebody link me to it?
I have an HP 4430s and two intel 320 drives.

 

RAID Guide:

If you're doing video editing (and even then; real time RAW uncompressed 4K video editing...) then you may benefit from RAID.

Otherwise; you're simply chasing benchmark 'scores'.


What is your intended workflow with this setup? A guess is that a more modern SSD will easily keep up and even outperform the 320's you now have, while being more reliable and robust too.

 

I appreciate the reply.

I got the two hard drives about a year ago. I've installed one in mine and the other was suppose to go into my girlfriend's laptop, but she now has a Macbook Air so the SSD is just collecting dust. I haven't really been keeping up with any electronic news or prices, but my guess is the value of this has dropped significantly which has led me to research and learn about raid and put the second one in my laptop as soon as possible so I won't lose any more value on the drive. I've posted it on craigslist for $130 (I believe I got it for $125 a year ago), but nobody has answered. Don't really like posting on eBay cause of fees and have never sold on a forum.

 

Thanks for the background info.

If you can install 2 drives in your notebook - go ahead - that doesn't mean it has to be RAID though.

An idea for you:

With a 'fresh' SSD - why not try Win8x64 PRO on the new SSD? (There are trial versions available).

Give it a good try (I would recommend at least a month of use) and I bet you will find it a good upgrade going into 2013.

If you do end up buying it: simply format your original SDD (after moving/copying your data, of course) and use it as extra storage and possibly as a 'File History' location for your Win8 install (a very Time Machine-like backup for Windows).

There are many benefits to having two physical drives in a notebook (having the option of two O/S's is one...) and upgrading to Win8 brings many benefits that you will enjoy each time you use the system.

Why am I recommending Win8 so highly? Because it makes the most efficient use of your modern hardware (like SSD's).

Also highly recommended: 8GB RAM or more and leaving at least 20GB (better=30% of the capacity - how big are these 320's you have) of each SSD's capacity as 'unallocated' to give the most consistent and highest performance your system has to offer.

Good luck.

 

Let me see if I understand what you're saying..

I should replace my current SSD with the new SSD and install Windows 8. Then take the older SSD and replace my optical drive with it. Do I install Windows 8 on the secondary drive also?

And how do I set up 'FIle History'? Is that a Windows 8 feature?

 

The first part is right - just don't install Win8 onto the secondary SSD though...

To setup File History (yes a Win8 feature);

See:
The Complete Guide To Windows 8 File History Backup

 

I would agree to go with Win8 but I see no disadvantage with going with Raid 0. Surely the performance difference in common everyday tasks doesn't scale like it does for video editing or large file transfers, but it does make the system slightly faster. For example it could cut down boot times from 15 seconds to 12 seconds. SSDs rarely fail these days, and we're talking about Intel SSDs here.. It probably wouldn't be worth the money to invest in another drive if you only had one, but the OP already has 2, so why not?

 

The answer to the 'why not' is when the RAID0 array fails for any number of reasons.......... and no backup in sight (no, not DATA backup - I mean a physical 'system backup' so you can continue and/or finish your work 'right now').

RAID0 can be finicky and while I've seen systems work for years without issue (my own...) I have also been on the opposite side of that coin with a RAID array that would fail if you looked at it sideways...

Worse, in RAID you won't get even a 3 second speedup in bootup times - the other way (3 seconds longer) would be a more realistic expectation.

With higher complexity (and RAID0 is a much more complex setup...) reliability takes a nosedive - I don't recommend it under any circumstances for 'normal' uses.

 

RAID for SSDs only really improve transfer speeds. The metric you should be looking at for boot times is low queue depth 4k Random Read performance which will probably decrease since RAID 0 has computational overhead (increases latency). Plus, improving boot times (random 4k read) is difficult because we are tending towards the latency limit of the NAND cells themselves as opposed to their transfer speed since most modern controllers are no longer the bottleneck. MLC NAND has a baseline latency which can't really be improved by better manufacturing even though the cells can get faster (with difficulty) the only real way to improve is by upgrading to SLC (which has half the latency) and even then the improvement is only about 20%-30%.
The most important issue with RAID SSDs is the loss of TRIM. TRIM only got implemented for RAID recently with the desktop Z68 and Z77 chipsets and I doubt its coming to laptops anytime soon. This means that those RAID0 320s will degrade performance really fast and you will eventually end up with slower drives than had you kept the drives separate. The only way then to recover performance is to secure erase both drives and do a new RAID array

 

True, I realize that 4K random reads are compromised in Raid 0, not by much though. I got lost in the technical talk there , but I actually noticed an improvement in boot time (through Boot Timer) with my Raid setup. I remember a few post of the same results for a few other members, mainly in the Alienware forums. Strange, but maybe it differs in other systems. I don't know how many notebooks out there can support the new RST with TRIM, but I've been using it flawlessly for 6+ months now. Write speeds are right up there with desktop Raid SSDs.

In the end it comes down to the user, whether he/she is willing to risk the chances of drive failure, possible decrease in performance and loss of TRIM.