Windows-Raid Performance SSD

[countzero]

yo,

i'm considering putting maybe 2, 3 samsung 850 pro ssds an a raid-0. got a Lsi 9207 HBA with a couple of ports free. the hba can do 4 gigs a second i think. my concern is, that windors raid, done in disk management, will kill the performance.
anybody here ever tried that?

cheers

 

[D3LL]

It probably would create a bottle neck as it does with most raids. Why not just use one large drive and partition it if need be?

 

[countzero]

by large drive you mean one big ssd?
naw, i wanna reach 1.5 gig/second sequential read/write, is a scratch disk for video work. ssd array should match my hdd raid array speedwise but with less disks. very first world problem.

 

[cluberti]

One problem you'll run into is lack of TRIM support, which could seriously degrade performance. If you're going to do fast flash storage, you'll get little performance from doing old-school RAID, and you won't be able to use TRIM without a RAID controller that supports it (and there aren't many, and that LSI isn't one of them). Consider PCIE-based flash devices, like PCI-E SSDs or (better) things like FusionIO PCIE-Flash devices. They're faster than drives over SATA, and won't cost much more than a set of SSDs of similar size either. They usually have higher MTBF lifetimes too, so they would last longer, theoretically, under heavy load.

 

[countzero]

yeah, pcie flash... good one would set me back a grand instead 500, at half the space. i don't need insane reads i need symmetrical read/write. also i already have all 6 pci-e slots in my current system in use. my life is just so sad.
ah, yeah, i forgot about trim, good point. i'm suprised cause those drives are in their compatability lists.
but well, i guess i'll just get another drive anyway and see how that goes. i'll live if it doesn't.

and on one point i'll have to disagree with you, cluberti. afaik modern raid controllers will give you completely bonkers read/writes up to 4 gig a second (using enterprise ssds). my hba is advertised for that speed. i could flash my HBA to be a 9217 and support up to raid 10. hesitant to do that though, cause my Tape drive might not like that... BTW has anyone here tried to run LTO-6 of a 9217? kidding...

 

[cluberti]

Honestly, in my experience, most RAID controllers aren't any better (performance-wise) than running in IT mode and letting the OS manage it (although an NTFS system on Windows is likely to be slower than, say, ZFS on a *nix). And the drives might be compatible, but TRIM is issued either by the OS or by the card, and that card doesn't issue TRIM commands. The OS can't see individual drives behind a RAID controller, so it won't issue a TRIM to a RAID volume in that configuration, which can (and probably will) affect performance down the road.

RAID SSDs on a controller like the 9217 will be fast, but not much more so than the OS could handle doing the RAID itself (CPU util on the host might be a bit higher, but perf should be similar). If your I/O is all sequential at larger sizes (and faster reads vs writes, as with most SSDs), the perf should be pretty good, but anything under the stripe and block size will probably not be much faster than a single drive.

 

[countzero]

agreed. since i only care about the performance of huge files i should be fine.
and if performance drops i'll might swap the drives for enterprise units, maybe i'll to run them idle on a trim aware controller for a day or two inbetween. thx cluberti! if there's anything you always wanted to know about pro video, just ask.