6 Drives in Raid on a 790i. Do i need a controller?

712 Views 16 Replies 11 Participants Last post by OpTiMaTeZ, Nov 29, 2009

OpTiMaTeZ

Discussion Starter · Nov 29, 2009

I have 2 WDBlacks 1TB in raid0 now and it is fantastic, but after black friday i purchased 4 of these:
OCZSSD2-1VTX30G
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...tent-_-text-_-

I will put 4 of those in raid0 also to be used for my games/OS/apps. Will they have good performance? I have read a lot of bad reviews about it not liking nvidia chipsets. So my basic question is, is having 6 drives in RAID on this motherboard going to overload it? Will getting a dedicated RAID controller bypass any problems the drives have with firmware updates or anything other issues they have with nvidia chipsets? Any recommendations on a raid controller if it is needed?

Rep to all, and thanks for your help.

OpTi

EDIT: another thought, i got 4 drives mainly to have enough space, but will getting 4 smaller drives give me a significant boost over having 2? Any benchmarks on that with a system similar to mine? Thanks.

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xHassassin

· #2 · Nov 29, 2009

Erm... The 4 SSDs seem like overkill a bit, but will definitely give you a significant boost over the 2 x 1TB.
Not sure about whether or not you're going to need a better controller, but if you're going to pour 400+ bucks into a setup like that I would just to be safe. IIRC, the maximum most onboard controllers can handle in an array is 4, although I am a bit outdated, and may be wrong.

Don't really see the point in running all 6 drives in RAID0 though.

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Hickeydog

· #3 · Nov 29, 2009

For THAT much throughput potential, I would get a good dedicated card. If you were doing it with hard drives, probably not, but those SSD's can crank out massive data transfer.

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OpTiMaTeZ

Discussion Starter · #4 · Nov 29, 2009

the speeds of 2 would have been fine, but i needed 120 to hold everything. and after calculating it out, i found that 4 of these is a better price than most 2x 60gigs. so i figured hell, a better price and better performance so go with it. I kept the current drives in raid0 since they are my boot and storage. However, since i will go with the SSD's as my boot now i will still have to keep the WDBlacks in raid0 since i am using that 2TB of storage and i dont have another place to keep it yet. Thanks for the input, and do you have any recommendations for affordable cards that can handle all 6 drives and more since ill be adding more disk drives soon to backup and expand my 2TB?

c00lkatz

· #5 · Nov 29, 2009

The onboard RAID will bottleneck for sure. Get a dedicated card. Is it 100% required? No. Is it HIGHLY advisable? Yes.

And you may want to keep the current boot section on your current RAID, as you will need to take those drives out of RAID to run TRIM and Garbage Collection.

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sccr64472

· #6 · Nov 29, 2009

If it were me, I'd sell those before you open them and buy 1 bigger SSD. Unfortunately, I don't believe TRIM supports Raid yet and without it, your SSD performance will degrade as the drives are used. It's your call and I hate to suggest selling something that you just bought, but that's exactly what I'd do. Not to mention the bigger drives are usually faster than the smaller models. Just an example, read the specs on the Patriot Torqx...

"• 256GB and 128GB: Sequential Read: up to 260MB/s Sequential Write: up to 180MB/s
• 64GB: Sequential Read: up to 220MB/s Sequential Write: up to 135MB/s"

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...dlist=celebros

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OpTiMaTeZ

Discussion Starter · #7 · Nov 29, 2009

Indeed trim doesnt support raid from what i have read, but the wiper program does if i am not mistaken. And, the larger drives do have marginal speed increases, but if my motherboard doesn't bottle neck the speeds, the raid0 config should demolish the speeds of a single large SSD.

sccr64472

· #8 · Nov 29, 2009

Quote:

Originally Posted by OpTiMaTeZ

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Indeed trim doesnt support raid from what i have read, but the wiper program does if i am not mistaken. And, the larger drives do have marginal speed increases, but if my motherboard doesn't bottle neck the speeds, the raid0 config should demolish the speeds of a single large SSD.

Don't forget to look at cpu utilization if you're doing this for performance reasons. With an onboard raid controller, it will be relying on the cpu for calculations. I can't give you specific numbers,but I remember seeing as high as 9% on some Raid 5 configurations and that was a huge turnoff for me. A 9% cpu load isn't something to scoff at.

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guyladouche

· #9 · Nov 29, 2009

OP, to clarify, you are going to have one RAID0 disk as your 4x SSD's, and one additional RAID0 disk as your 2x blacks, right? I think that will definitely suffer from the on-board controller. IIRC, more than 3 drives in RAID0 on most onboard controllers suffers from bottlenecking, let alone 2 separate RAID0 drives from 6 disks. So I think you should definitely invest in a dedicated controller. But how much are you willing to spend? Because a 6+ port controller is going to be pretty pricey. Even a 4 port and using your onboard for the second raid0 disk is going to be pretty pricey.

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vix

· #10 · Nov 29, 2009

It's been a while since I last used an onboard RAID controller, however my experience with my old X38 MatrixRAID setup was that onboard RAID0 really bottlenecked with any array of more than four drives. My four old raptors got great performance, but any more and my benchies went all to hell. Six raptors yielded worse performance than a four drive array.

If you're serious about getting max performance out of those SSD's, I'd seriously recommend investment in a decent controller. (I absolutely love my Areca 1230)

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LiNERROR

· #11 · Nov 29, 2009

the ICH9 is spanked by a good raid controller... but for a 4/8 port you're looking at $300-500

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Infrabasse

· #12 · Nov 29, 2009

I wouldn't worry about breaking the raid array for TRIM on these vertexes.
FW 1.41 brings very good garbage collection to the table and it works in raid.

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vix

· #13 · Nov 29, 2009

The ICH9R worked great if you configured it for a short stroked RAID0 array, but mediocre performance when configured into a single partition. SSD's in a RAID0 array will, nonetheless, require a dedicated card for optimal results.

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tagurtoast

· #14 · Nov 29, 2009

Get a perc 6i And what will you do if your Raid 0 arrays fail?

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c00lkatz

· #15 · Nov 29, 2009

Also remember if you move over to a dedicated card, you're going to have to reformat your other two 1TB drives if you want them on the new card. Otherwise you will need to just get a 4-port controller to put the SSD's on and keep your 2x1TB on your current onboard RAID (which isn't a problem, it will handle two drives just fine).

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the_beast

· #16 · Nov 29, 2009

I'm gonna go against the flow here.

Your 4xSSD array WILL be bottlenecked by the ICH9R. But it will still likely be faster than almost ALL add-in cards for your OS. Having the cards on an expansion slot can add significant latencies, so you can drop IOPS performance by switching to an add-in card.

I would also assume that if you had the cash for a decent hardware controller you would not have worried about the difference in price between 4x30GB and 2x60GB or 1x120GB.

One more thing - the quoted cpu usage. For RAID0 this is a non-issue. There is practically no cpu overhead for RAID0. RAID5 is a completely different matter though - and you should not run RAID5 for your OS anyway, even with SSDs and an add-in hardware XOR controller.

Save your cash - if all you are running is RAID0 then you don't really need an add-in card. Your sequential benchmarks will show that your drives are bottlenecked at the high end, but your real-world performance will be identical. Your IOPS performance will likely be somewhat better than it would be on an add-in.

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OpTiMaTeZ

Discussion Starter · #17 · Nov 29, 2009

I hear everyones point, and i think i will try out using them on the onboard and just see what speeds i get and if the extra speed is worth the cards, after looking at some they do seem to be in the 300+ range, and i wrongly assumed at the time of purchase that a card would be in the 30-100 range

.
However, i did read several reviews that these drives dont work well with nvidia chipsets. If i did get a card, would that bypass any issues they had with nvidia or would they still not be able to update firmware?

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