New Machine AND new to SSD newb questions

Im updating my system. I got me 2 corsair 128 GB 2D drives. I know my MB has sata II But my question is, Is a regular sata cable good or are there sata 2 cables? And if so, can I still use regular sata cables via backwards compatability, and how much will that slow me down?

And is a raid situation of any use to increase speed with ssd? Not sure raid 0 or 1 but the one where two drives become one. Not the miror.

And lastly any new stuff I should be aware of with the new ssd

Any help appreciated. Thanks

RAID 0 = stripe

RAID 1 = mirror

Im updating my system. I got me 2 corsair 128 GB 2D drives. I know my MB has sata II But my question is, Is a regular sata cable good or are there sata 2 cables? And if so, can I still use regular sata cables via backwards compatability, and how much will that slow me down?

 

And is a raid situation of any use to increase speed with ssd? Not sure raid 0 or 1 but the one where two drives become one. Not the miror.

 

And lastly any new stuff I should be aware of with the new ssd

 

Any help appreciated. Thanks

The cables that came with your motherboard will work fine. Any cables that you buy will pretty much be SATA II.

If you use a RAID 0, all the benchmark tests show a huge improvement in reads and writes, but I don't notice much in real world use, in all honesty. All I really gained is more space, and I could have gotten that cheaper by just buying one P256 drive instead of two P128's.

One drive alone is very, very fast and the RAID array will actually slow the computer boot time by a few seconds because of the RAID BIOS overhead.

These are just my experiences and yours may differ, but hopefully its helpful from a users point of view.

The cables that came with your motherboard will work fine. Any cables that you buy will pretty much be SATA II.

 

If you use a RAID 0, all the benchmark tests show a huge improvement in reads and writes, but I don't notice much in real world use, in all honesty. All I really gained is more space, and I could have gotten that cheaper by just buying one P256 drive instead of two P128's.

 

One drive alone is very, very fast and the RAID array will actually slow the computer boot time by a few seconds because of the RAID BIOS overhead.

 

These are just my experiences and yours may differ, but hopefully its helpful from a users point of view.

Interesting. My main reason for the 128 gig drives is, for 1, video editing. Im wondering if the raid 0 will help me much on this. Im guessing not being the real bottleneck would be the graphix card and cpu. Not that up on the actual speeds of these new components Im getting. And 2. Of course for hi end games. The scene and room changes.

I used to raid 0 2 76 gig raptors. Partition for 2 OSs. Now Im thinking use the drives indevidual with an os on each. But now Im rethinking it with the readwrite increase. Im also concerned with drive lettering. When I run XP 32 bit, I want it to be on c and same with vista 64 bit.

Wadda ya think?

And thanks again for the help.

You can do the same thing with SSDs, though you might want to use a "real" hardware RAID controller. At least I don't have alot of faith in my ICH10R.

Here are my results from CrystalDiskMark for a single P128 and 3 P128s in RAID 0 on my ICH10R. I just got an Adaptec 5445Z and am hoping for even better results with it.

Installing the OS of choice onto the C: drive comprised of a SSD RAID shouldn't be any more of an issue with SSDs as any other HDDs. I have Windows 7 on my RAID 0. Deciding on which way to go could be difficult. These things are very fast. I'm sort of leaning on using the single drives and flip flop them as I want. Start time isn't much of an issue anymore...then again there is the space gain in using RAID with dual boot OSs.

Single P128 SSD

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1877/18796408.jpg

3 x P128 SSD in RAID 0

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/9171/zr32.jpg

You can do the same thing with SSDs, though you might want to use a "real" hardware RAID controller. At least I don't have alot of faith in my ICH10R.

 

Here are my results from CrystalDiskMark for a single P128 and 3 P128s in RAID 0 on my ICH10R. I just got an Adaptec 5445Z and am hoping for even better results with it.

 

Installing the OS of choice onto the C: drive comprised of a SSD RAID shouldn't be any more of an issue with SSDs as any other HDDs. I have Windows 7 on my RAID 0. Deciding on which way to go could be difficult. These things are very fast. I'm sort of leaning on using the single drives and flip flop them as I want. Start time isn't much of an issue anymore...then again there is the space gain in using RAID with dual boot OSs.

 

 

Single P128 SSD

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1877/18796408.jpg

 

 

3 x P128 SSD in RAID 0

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/9171/zr32.jpg

Sweet mother of Mary Thats fast :) I must go raid. Unfortunatly I got a couple of probs with the SSDs already. You can chack it out at

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=80372 If you want.

Thanks again for all the help

Hello GaPony, I myself am trying to decide between a "real' RAID controler and the onboard stuff (ASUS M4A78T-E). I am a student (retired auto mechanic being retrained) and for Fall semester I am studying Server 2008. Part of the class is setting up different RAID configurations.

A benifit of the class is that we all get free Microsoft OS's (any type,as many copies as you need). So I am making a "server' out of desktop hardware.

Mind you my work is all educational (as in this Server is not going to be put to work at least not right away) Also for fall is a web design class, so at the end of the semester I will use this server I created to host the web site for my retirement community (about 300 homes 1000 people).

My post started out with a RAID question and kinda drifted into general questions to my server construction.

I want to stay with a single CPU (Phenom 955) but please give me some direction here.

Best Regards Daniel R.

On a strictly educational level, you'd be better off with RAID card like an Adaptec 5405 (4 internal SAS ports on a PCIe card) simply because it allows for more varying types of RAID configurations, so more learning opportunities. In my tests with a 5445 (4 internal and 4 external SAS ports on a PCIe card) I found the performance of the RAID card was substantially better than the ICH10R controller on my ASUS P5Q Deluxe mobo. Of course the performance comes at a premium, as good RAID cards are not cheap... but neither are P128 drives.

In practical application for hosting a web site, you could probably do fine with the onboard SB750 southbridge. The unknown in this equation is the most important information to have... While web pages are generally pretty small and quickly transferred, you may have larger files available for download or lots of high definition images backing up thumbnails on your pages. Knowing how many people you'll serve is good to know, but even better is how many at any given time. Your instructor can probably give you a good estimate on exactly what your hardware requirements are going to be.

On a stricly performance basis, you can see the results above with three P128s connected to my onboard controller. Here are the results of those same drives connected to a high quality RAID controller card. In both cases the RAID 0 array utilized a strip size of 128.

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/2362/cdmssd128.png

While benchmark tests are good for comparing configurations, I don't find they are of alot of benefit for estimating real world performance beyond a very general guidline for different applications. Its all rather meaningless if your application is way outside the norm.

Thank you GaPony, I am going to check out the RAID controller you mentioned. I am not jumping right into buying equipment that may not suit my main goal (diverse educational and training set-ups).

I do notice on several RAID cards I reviewed that the OS that the RAID card "accepts" sometimes does not include Server 2008 or Home Server. If I had it my way I would not use either for hosting a home web site (seems like overkill) but I will be using these two OS's because these are the one's the class deals with.

On another note this Corsair site is by far the best site I have ever visited (and I have been to many). In just two days of reading posts many questions have been answered and I have been given new direction.

I was sent to this site by Corsair tech. support (which is top notch) and I am very glad I did.

My question to Tech support dealt with ESA monitoring standards and how mixed up in them Corsair products are. The rep. did not feel much value in ESA monitoring for power supplies alone as Corsair has this area covered (you just don't see it). Thank you.

GaPony, You mention the use of SAS (and I believe this means SAS SCSI drives). Is this because if we are dealing with higher end RAID cards we have left the SATA2 hardware arena?

I see a HighPoint RocketRaid 2680 PCI-Express card on newegg that revieved 5 eggs and seem to be supported by a wide range of OS's and is in my price range ($250.00) do you have any comment on this product?

I have a friend that hosts his own web site (Theoldwrench.com, we are all retired auto mechanics) and he also advises that onboard RAID ability is limited and to use a dedicated controller.

Yea... SAS drives are SCSI, but I use an SAS card with a cable that connects to the SAS port and spreads out to 4 SATA drives. Its a little cleaner installation and has some minor future proofing advantage, I suppose.

FWIW, It would probably be cheaper in the long run to use a service to host your website... The website for my office costs about $10.00 per month and all we have to do is keep it updated. I think it allows for 2gb storage and 10gb of data transfer per month. You still need to pay the annual domain fees, but all the hardware is located somplace else. Just a thought.

unless you need to space (or Really Need high SEQ data rate) just buy one SSD that fits your needs if you have Never used an SSD before they are very fast far faster then raptors even in raid or 15K disks, the IOPS on an SSD is far higher then an HDD, RAID is more useful for server loads due to the IOPS on SSDs but makes wonders to vista as Vista Loves makes lots of disk operations that HDDs do not like

@jim_west

make sure the other SSD is not connected when installing windows when you install windows onto the other drive make sure the other SSD is not connected once you plug them both in you can use the F8 Bios option (Default for most BIOS to bring up boot option) to pick witch drive you want to boot from, both will be C: as windows will force that matter when it boots up

unless you need to space (or Really Need high SEQ data rate) just buy one SSD that fits your needs if you have Never used an SSD before they are very fast far faster then raptors even in raid or 15K disks, the IOPS on an SSD is far higher then an HDD, RAID is more useful for server loads due to the IOPS on SSDs but makes wonders to vista as Vista Loves makes lots of disk operations that HDDs do not like

 

@jim_west

make sure the other SSD is not connected when installing windows when you install windows onto the other drive make sure the other SSD is not connected once you plug them both in you can use the F8 Bios option (Default for most BIOS to bring up boot option) to pick witch drive you want to boot from, both will be C: as windows will force that matter when it boots up

Thank you for the advice. And thank everyone for your input.

A couple of things. Unfortunatly being so new to SSDs, Im not familliar with alot of the terminology. So Ill have to do some studying. And also, I decided to raid 0 and do 3 partitions. An XP32, which I did on the first 30 gig partition, then a 60 gig for Vista 64 bit, which is my next install. And lastly the rest, a work partition for my video editing and high end games.

Nothing in stone tho. If someone has a different approach, Im open for suggestions.