Able to disable RAID 0 on Z1311?

Hey folks...

I have a Z1311 on order (should arrive tomorrow). I want to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro to it (I bought several copies outright since I build my own desktop machines), and install Ubuntu and some other preboot software.

Does anyone know if you can easily disable the SSD RAID 0 setup in the BIOS so you can have the two SSDs as separate physical drives at boot time? I would assume that's possible.

- Tim

 

On the Z2 you cn enable in bios to show the Raid Setup. When starting up I have to press crtl + i to configure the raid 0. You can kill it there and all data will be lost.

 

Thanks much! Do you happen to know if RAID 0 in these models increases I/O performance? Unless Sony has set them up so that it's doing concurrent I/O to both SSDs, I would think the RAID 0 setup is just to create a single large disk from the two.

- Tim

 

Raid 0 means striped, i.e. performance increase. AFAIK, all Z models with SSDs have used striped Raid 0 from factory, and just for that reason, performance.

Just combining two drives to create a larger logical drive isn't formally RAID, but usually called JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives).

 

Ah - I think I had seen folks use RAID 0 and JBOD interchangeably - I have plenty of computers with RAID controllers, but haven't set up RAIDs on them.

Tom's Hardware had a bunch of charts of RAID-0 vs. non-RAID for various configurations, and it definitely showed significant (eg. up to 2x) speed improvements for many operations. Plenty of arguments on how that translates into "real world/noticeable improvements", but it's nice to see.

I'm wondering if it would be noticeable enough to me so that I'd want RAID over single drives.

I'm also curious what SSD controllers Sony is using on the new Z series, so I could know if it supports TRIM, or if it has some other garbage-collection mechanism. I'd prefer TRIM if possible, and I know that, at least as of May, no SSD supposedly supported it.

- Tim

 

^ The current SSD generation is already very fast. RAID0 does accelerate sequential speeds very much (almost twice the speed of a single drive, so very good efficiency). Downside is that you have slightly higher CPU utilization (striping work between the RAID member drives is done by the CPU) and double the failure rate. As opposed to JBOD configurations, if one member drive in RAID0 fails, all data of the whole RAID array is lost.

Sony uses the integrated Intel SATA RAID controller in the Series-7 chipset. This is no hardware RAID controller with dedicated RAM and processor, the work is done by the CPU. It is controlled by the controller firmware (Intel Rapid Storage Technology v11.0.0.1339) and Intel RST drivers. Terms to search for if you want to know more are: software-RAID, fake-RAID or firmware-RAID.

Samsung's SSDs do have a GC which is primarily used to maintain write speeds. They also support TRIM. Currently, the Intel RST driver still does NOT support TRIM for drives that are part of a RAID array. It accepts TRIM commands from the OS but simply does not forward them to the drives. So TRIM is not being used in VAIO Z models at this time. But there is good news, it WILL come!

Intel announced quite some time ago, that their RST driver version 11.5 will introduce support for TRIM in RAID arrays. We, the Z community, are desperately waiting for that to be released as this would bring TRIM to all current and previous Z models that use RAID. There are two beta drivers already released that do work and I am quite sure Intel will come up with a final WHQL driver later this year.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/467519-how-configure-raid-jbod-new-vpcz1-series-ssd.html

 

Thanks for all the info and suggestions folks! Much appreciated!

pyr0, out of curiosity, do you feel that using RAID-0 in a 2x128gb configuration (as this notebook will have) is worth the tradeoff in possible array failure and CPU usage and storage overhead? (I just looked up storage overhead on RaidCalc - Raid Disk Space Utilization Calculator - Raid, RAID, Redundancy, Performance - iBeast Business Solutions - says with my configuration, only 238gb/256gb would be usable, tho' I don't know if that's filesystem overhead and not RAID overhead; RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks says there is no storage overhead for RAID 0 - I need to read up some more ).

Oh, and finally, does anyone know if these latest Z series machines can be switched to AHCI mode in the BIOS? I don't just want to use JBOD; the guide mentioned above says you can't use AHCI in the Z1 series, so I was wondering if that changed with the Z3 series.

I will be using this notebook primarily for work; I do Java development in an enterprise environment, so I'd be running JEE servers, possibly database servers, other web servers, Eclipse, etc. We're doing development in GWT (Google Web Toolkit), and that takes a lot of memory and processing power to use in its development environment - many small reads and writes, not a whole lot of big sequential reads and writes.

- Tim

 

hi there，I found you posted a hack to mod the z2 2011 bios for unlocking the advanced options，have you got a mod for R1013H5 version bios mod?。。。。I'm trying to let the Mavericks run on my Z237，but it seems it's can't works with intel's raid
。。。。。thanks