SSD and 9262

I just sold my d900c to my little brother and was interested in buying a new one cause lets face it, once you own that laptop going to any other will just be silly.

I had a couple of questions though.

First, I have never done any raid setups yet, and I was interested in buying 2 Intel X25-M and putting them in raid 0 and adding the 320 gb HDD as storage.

Considering that this laptop uses software raid, is that going to be a problem for me in terms of performance?

Does anyone else have a similar setup with SSDs and is it working like you thought it would?

I am planning on buying the mlc drives cause I heard that if you put them in raid 0 it sortof cancels out the write bottleneck they have ( if thats what you want to call it. )

Thoughts anyone?

 

RAID-0 still gains performance even if its software.

A few NBR members have already done the same setup:
- two SSD's in RAID
- third HDD as single

 

Justin mentioned that 9262 had hardware RAID.

 

I own two different Clevo based 9262 type machines. One of them has two MTRON server class SSDs in RAID 0 while the other has a standard high-speed hard disk. For normal work the difference in peppiness is quite noticeable. However the reason we use the SSDs is for enterprise integration testing. I think most people are going to be a little disappointed with the perceived performance improvement that they actually see using SSDs. For normal workload, the primary difference you will see is quick boots and quick application startup.

I have a bunch of i7 based machines (desktop boxes) on order that will include the Intel SSDs in RAID zero. If you have the money go ahead just don't think you're going to see an astonishing increase in performance.

I would also recommend that you go over the AnandTech site if you haven't already and read the various articles on SSDs. Your comment about RAID0 making up for an SSDs bad write performance is only partially correct and is way too complex a topic to cover in a short post. Unless the SSD is specially optimized (like the MTRON's are for server usage ) the write performance will slow down over time due to the necessity for garbage collection style "erase before write" when the drive starts to fill up. There is still significant variations in capabilities between manufacturers that don't always get captured in the initial benchmark testing because the drives arrived empty from the manufacturer.

As far as I can tell so far from the information provided by Intel, garbage collection is pretty efficient and without spending a huge sum of money on server class devices. However it's still early in the game for SSDs. While the useful life of these devices should be measured in years, I would expect new generations of better performing and better price performance devices every 6 months for the next three years (See Microns latest press release).

If you don't have a specific application that benefits from the use of the SSD in RAID 0 (and if you can't think of one right off the top of your head you don't) it all depends on how fat your wallet is.

Phil Schaadt