Intel DP67bg motherboard "RAID" question

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Cujet

Cujet

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My PC uses the Intel DP67bg performance motherboard from a few years ago, along with a i7 2700K processor. Performance is good enough for any games we play.

I use a 240Gb SSD (OCZ vertex III) as the C drive. It's too small. So, I purchases another OCZ vertex III (newer version) and would like to hook them up in a RAID configuration, for 480GB capacity.

Having never done this, I don't know what RAID this is. 0, 1 etc? Or how to configure the MB to do this.

I'll have to find and download the instructions, and the latest BIOS. But I am certain that the MB box said the MB was RAID capable for just such a setup.

Thoughts?
 
Since your only using 2 drives and your wanting them to act as 1 physical drive with no redundancy, raid 0 is your only Choice.

Setting up a raid in the bios is easy. But be aware you'll have to reinstall your OS in order to do a raid config with your drives.
 
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Use dynamic disks in Windows and extend the volume to the new disk.

If you use any RAID level you may lose TRIM functinality and have to rely on the drive's built-in free space scavanging (less reliable).

There is no real world gain to using striping (RAID0) with an SSD.

You could use JBOD if the controller has that functionality (I have no idea) but in the past this also caused problems with TRIM.
 
Originally Posted By: Ramblejam
Originally Posted By: Cujet
Thoughts?


What's taking up all the space?

Return the SSD, and pick up a 2TB Barracuda: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148834

Now, you'd have a SSD boot/system drive for performance, and a secondary HDD for mass storage.



I've avoided those due to 25% failure rate. Plus the SSD really improves my gaming performance.

Mama is a gamer and has many "Steam" games on the computer. Plus even though we put iTunes music on the 3TB storage drive, iTunes moves the music over to C when we load it to a phone or classic iPod.
 
Originally Posted By: Subdued
Use dynamic disks in Windows and extend the volume to the new disk.

If you use any RAID level you may lose TRIM functinality and have to rely on the drive's built-in free space scavanging (less reliable).

There is no real world gain to using striping (RAID0) with an SSD.

You could use JBOD if the controller has that functionality (I have no idea) but in the past this also caused problems with TRIM.


In Windows 7, it will not allow the primary disc that "span" 2 discs as the "C" drive. I can do it on other storage discs, such as my "F" drive, no problem. But that does not solve the issue.

I don't understand why a RAID 0 would lose TRIM on an SSD. It should know that there are 2 of them.

It's my understanding that RAID 0 would allow me to make a 480GB "C" drive out of 2ea, 240GB SSD's. Is this not an advantage? I do need the space.
 
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TRIM won't work on RAID 0 unless you meet the three criteria spelled out in this article: http://news.softpedia.com/news/TRIM-Command-Possible-on-RAID-0-Setups-in-Windows-8-286480.shtml

Or it might work with Intel Series 6 parts, interesting article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6477/trim-raid0-ssd-arrays-work-with-intel-6series-motherboards-too

If you have the $$, create an SSD RAID0 like they did:
smile.gif
 
Originally Posted By: Cujet
It's my understanding that RAID 0 would allow me to make a 480GB "C" drive out of 2ea, 240GB SSD's. Is this not an advantage? I do need the space.


Advantage = join two separate drives to create one double the size of the two individual drives.

Disadvantage = if one drive fails, then all of the data is lost on both drives.

If you choose to use RAID 0, then be certain that you are religiously performing backups of the data.
 
Originally Posted By: Ramblejam
Originally Posted By: Cujet
I've avoided those due to 25% failure rate.


Have data on this?



I'm guessing not from a legitimate source.

Separating the important sh"t from the system drive is the best thing to do outside of a rigorous backup routine. System crashes or hard disk fails, its all still there when you replace and reinstall. What more could one ask for??
 
RAID0 is the only option to do what you want to do since your controller doesn't support JBOD, but I question the sanity of anyone who doesn't seperate out their system drive from their data drive. Obviously laptops are an exception.

You seriously wouldn't even need to reforma your system and start from scratch. Just put new stuff on the new drive and move as necessary.

25% failure rate is beyond the old DeathStar 75GXP and would be big news if true. It's not.
 
Originally Posted By: Cujet
I don't understand why a RAID 0 would lose TRIM on an SSD. It should know that there are 2 of them.


No, actually, it doesn't know there are 2 of them.

When you create a RAID array, the BIOS of the array controller takes over all logical IO communication to and from the OS. The OS literally sees one drive. And it's a drive that is not advertising itself as an SSD.

Not only will TRIM not work, but you also need to manually disable the automatic disk defrag as well, unless you want to significantly shorten the life of your drives.

There are exceptions as outlined above, but they're just that, exceptions.

If you don't have a backup solution, you better get one. A two-drive RAID0 array has a 100% greater chance of failing and hosing all of your data than one. Add a 3rd drive and that RAID0 has a 200% greater chance of failing. And so on.

There's more to consider than just throwing a couple of disks together and calling it a day.
 
Thanks guys!!

Sorry for not being more clear. It has 2ea 2TB drives for data storage, while both are not mirrored, they each contain the same data.

The 240GB "C" drive is just for games, programs and so on. Every bit of storage is elsewhere.

As far as the hybrid drive above, I read about the problems with it at the link provided above! 24% of the reviews give it one star for early failure.
 
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Originally Posted By: Cujet
As far as the hybrid drive above, I read about the problems with it at the link provided above! 24% of the reviews give it one star for early failure.


Who said anything about a hybrid drive?
 
Originally Posted By: Ramblejam
Originally Posted By: Cujet
As far as the hybrid drive above, I read about the problems with it at the link provided above! 24% of the reviews give it one star for early failure.


Who said anything about a hybrid drive?


Hahahaha, nobody! I've completely lost my mind! I had been reading an old article about them and it seems I mixed up my response. Ugh.
 
I highly advise against RAID0 with SSD's especially for the system drive. Why? Because you are cutting in half the time to failure (all drives fail, it's an inevitability), you are reducing useable space (you will have a lot of blocks that are only partially filled), any trouble with one drive means ALL YOUR DATA IS GONE, and the one that is most commonly misunderstood: you will not see any speed benefits from it. This is bbecause, in RAID, SSD's do increase their sequential speed (well, the array does) with incredible efficiency, but they don't gain anything else, which means that random reads/writes are not any faster than a single drive. Guess what? The OS, along with almost everything else, consists almosteexclusively of RANDOM access.

RAID makes a lot of sense for large amounts of data on platter drives, because you can achieve redundancy AND speed increases for the data (note: RAID0 has negative redundancy). I run a number of arrays on my home systems/servers, from simple 2-drive RAID1 to 8x2TB RAID6+HS to nested arrays (note: do not use parity RAID for arrays w disks larger than 2TB; the odds of an unrecoverable read error duringa rebuild are as high as 100 ppercent w RAID5! This means all data is gone).

I recommend that you simply use the new SSD as a second separate drive, and start keeping stuff spread across drives better. And in the future, do yourself a HUGE favor and stick to Samsung, Plextor, Crucial/Intel, or SanDisk for drives, they're (in order) the most reliable and fastest drives in the consumer sector.
 
I wouldn't use onboard RAID for anything except extra ports. Worthless feature that does more harm than good. Whenever Ive run a RAID on one, it would desync every other day, needing a full rebuild just in time to desync again. Thats why I have a Adaptec 6805 in my main machine. I think it ran me like $350 plus I have the "ZMM" for it to run the cache in write back mode safely.
 
Onboard RAID isn't completely useless, in fact when you are running something like a media storage PC for streaming video to other parts of the house, I sure would not be shelling out for a HW RAID Card (and the PERC5/i or 6/i would not work, as media storage generally = 3-4TB drives).

I agree that it isn't a good idea for a primary machine, but I don't see any real reason for RAID on a regular desktop. It has its places, but day to day use generally isn't one.

(I have quite a few arrays at home, as I love to build computers, and data is valuable to me; mostly use LSI, areca, for controllers)
 
Originally Posted By: nleksan
Onboard RAID isn't completely useless, in fact when you are running something like a media storage PC for streaming video to other parts of the house, I sure would not be shelling out for a HW RAID Card (and the PERC5/i or 6/i would not work, as media storage generally = 3-4TB drives).

I agree that it isn't a good idea for a primary machine, but I don't see any real reason for RAID on a regular desktop. It has its places, but day to day use generally isn't one.

(I have quite a few arrays at home, as I love to build computers, and data is valuable to me; mostly use LSI, areca, for controllers)

I dont know. The few times Ive tried to use onboard, it would always do what I posted above. Both AMD and Intel controllers would fail in this way.

Thats what my machine does. Media storage, and more importantly backup images for all the other machines.
 
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