Linus Tech Tips Blog » RAID

4x Intel 510 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 on LSI 9260-8I Linus Tech Tips

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:21:30 +0000

www.ncix.com Finally hit the internal bottleneck of this impressive RAID card! And with only 4 drives…. The 510 is fast, yo.

My SSD RAID Woes Continue

Linus — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:34:40 +0000

Now I’ve added an Areca RAID card to the mix. This is starting to look like a worse and worse investment all the time. I wanted to try with a few different cards because I figured “Hey, now I’ve got an Areca, so it’ll just be a matter of 3 different products that function properly, but have varying levels of performance”.

WRONG!

Card #1 (ARC-1210) makes my POST & BIOS screens refuse to show. Windows boots fine, and from there I can configure RAID sets, but that’s not something I can accept as a 24/7 solution.

Card #2 (ARC-1222) boots fine in the machine, allows me to create a RAID set out of the four X25-M drives, gives great read performance, but then takes a big dump on the write performance (far worse than onboard), wavering up and down between about 225MB/s and 50MB/s (no consistency to it)

Card #3 (ARC-1680ix-8) failed to boot several times and simply hung at the “Waiting for RAID card firmware to become ready” screen the first couple attempts. I even left it overnight with that screen up and the little indicator spinning away. I decided to give it one more shot this morning to see what happened and it booted! I was thrilled, but write performance still sucks. Read/write caching are both enabled (as far as I can tell) and I’m almost at the end of my rope here…

A small problem with running 4 SSD RAID-0 on ICH10R

Linus — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:37:55 +0000

I’m far from releasing all of my benchmarks and experiences with this new setup, but I have run into a couple of problems worth mentioning in my quest for the best possible storage performance.

First I attemped my new setup with a 3ware 9690SA-4I and I created a forum thread over at XtremeSystems.org documenting my failure with that… What a waste of time that card was… After that I decided to move on to the Onboard, but there ARE bottlenecks and compromises that have to be made doing that.

I don’t notice the same freezing/hitching or lock ups that some have claimed exist with Jmicron controllers on cheap SSDs, but I *do* notices a sluggishness at times. I don’t think it’s related to the SSDs, but rather to the southbridge. One way to replicate it reliably is the Windows Experience Index. If anyone can shed some light I’m very interested to hear why this happens during the CPU Test…

Intel X25-M 80GB Drives Arrived Sooner Than I Thought – RAID Testing to Follow

Linus — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 06:51:39 +0000

Wow. I can’t believe they’re here already. I was expecting these to take quite a bit longer!

Unlike all of the other test floating around on the web, I actually paid for these. That’s right, more than $2500 in hard drives for 320GB of storage. That’s a cost of $7.6/GB! Evidently I’ve completely lost my mind, but I’m confident that the performance and overall speediness of my machine will justify the upgrade. Let’s hope I’m right *gulp*. RAID 0 performance on ICH10R and a 3Ware 9690SA-4I PCIe 8x hardware RAID card to follow!

I’m very excited!