OCZ Core V2 SSD drives in RAID = AWESOME

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Solid State Drives (SSD) & Hard Drives Discuss, OCZ Core V2 SSD drives in RAID = AWESOME at Computer Hardware forum; Quote:

Posted: 30-11-2008

Ibex (MyCE Resident): Posts: 817

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee-27

I'm a speed freak, so i'd probably add a third drive in RAID 0

Well it looks like you are committed to getting a third drive now. First there's the stuttering workaround to test (without wiping one of your current drives), then see if Raid 5 slows things down at all (go on, please) and finally you clearly can't live with the frustratingly slow setup that you have at the moment.

On a more serious note, it looks like Microsoft's fix is an indication that the SSD manufacturers were at least part right when they blamed Windows for the disappointing performance of their drives.

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Today (MyCE Staff): Posts: 15,596

Posted: 02-12-2008

krozz (New on Forum): Posts: 1

GREAT review!
I would like to ask a small question for all:

Do you think that (instead of buying this quite expensive RAID controller) if you used a RAM Disk as cache (with some sort of "real-time" backup/synchronization software) would it also solve the latency problem?

I don't know if it is possible or if it makes sense but would definitely be a cheaper solution.

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Posted: 02-12-2008

Ibex (MyCE Resident): Posts: 817

Remember that Windows already uses a big chunk of your RAM as a hard drive cache. I can't see how your proposed software setup would offer any additional benefit, even if it could be made to work.

The stuttering problem appears to be due to a specific problem with Windows and in post #25 Dee mentions that a workaround has been found for 32bit Windows.

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Posted: 05-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

A RAMdisk would be good for somethings that requires many small files that have to be written to the disc, such as the Internet Explorer cache. It's not going to replace a RAID controller though for performance.

Windows 7 is said to be SSD friendly. It isn't optimized yet for SSD (It's still pre-beta) but some performance improvements are already noted.

Compare with previous result (above)

ATTO (with Windows 7)

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Posted: 05-12-2008

debro (Blown to smitherines): Posts: 11,455

A Ram disk would be great, if you happen to have 4GB (or more) of free ram lying around, and you are running WinXp, or other small OS, and you have a dedicated image of the RAM Drive somewhere else to restore. Oops, knocked the ram card ... and your info is wiped. Or if the PC isn't turned on for awhile, or if there is a problem with the battery on the ram card, or whatever.

A default install of Vista is more than 4GB, which rules out the current mob of HDD's.

Honestly, I wouldn't use a ramdisk for anything other than a swap drive .. and then that's limited to the transfer speed of the Sata bus anyway.

Might as well just spend the $$$ on getting more Ram, or a SSD, or a USB Flash drive, which vista uses as well

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Posted: 05-12-2008

Kenshin (CDFreaks Resident): Posts: 12,722

One of the wisest reviews.

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Posted: 08-12-2008

debro (Blown to smitherines): Posts: 11,455

Windows vista is renowned for it's huge disk cache. Is there any major difference if you configure it for a significantly smaller cache, or otherwise disable superfetch?
If you use memory intensive programs, you aren't likely to be launching multiple programs, and the access times are negligible anyway

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Posted: 09-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

I always tweak my Vista as follows.
Pagefile disabled
Search Indexing disabled

Extra tweaks since i got the SSD drives
Drive indexing disabled. (useless for SSD anyway, because access times are so low).
Prefetch disabled.
Superfetch disabled
Defrag disabled.

So all these tests were with those Vista tweaks.

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Posted: 10-12-2008

bjd223 (CD Freaks Junior Member): Posts: 75

http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/320

The new drives have been announced. 200 mb/s read speed! The 30GB will launch at 129.00 US.

I will be getting 3 for a RAID0 or RAID5 (If I decide backups are worth it for an OS only partition?) array.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee-27

The new series of these drives will be out soon. I have no idea about the price, but they will be faster than these drives and feature a new controller which OCZ says fixes the stuttering problem when the drives are used with the motherboards onboard SATA controller.

A member on OCZ support forum has found a workaround for the stuttering problem for 32bit operating systems and OCZ themselves are working hard to find a solution for 64bit OS. The workaround for 32bit OS is a free peive of software from MS (no 64bit version yet). This would of course, save the expense of having to buy a hardware RAID card to get a single drive working properly.

I'm a speed freak, so i'd probably add a third drive in RAID 0

128K stripe size and, 4K cluster size (Vista standard).

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Posted: 10-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Quote:

Originally Posted by bjd223

The new drives have been announced. 200 mb/s read speed! The 30GB will launch at 129.00 US.

I will be getting 3 for a RAID0 or RAID5 (If I decide backups are worth it for an OS only partition?) array.

I hope to have one of these drives for testing, very soon. They should be widely available in January 2009.

3 in RAID 0 would be very fast, i think. Do you plan on a hardware RAID solution, or will you try them on the motherboards RAID controller?

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Posted: 11-12-2008

bjd223 (CD Freaks Junior Member): Posts: 75

I do not think that my ICH9R throughput would be enough to handle 3 of these things (I am going to double check the max throughput though). I will probably end up getting a PCIe Raid card by probably adaptec.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee-27

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Posted: 11-12-2008

ChiefNuts (CD Freaks Member): Posts: 158

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee-27

Not to get too off-topic here, but you always disable the page file in Vista? What amount or ram do you usually have for this?

I have 1 Core v2 OCZ, and I guess now I will be looking for another soon

disabling the defrag should be in bold letters on the instructions to install the SSD, but they should also mention the prefetch & superfetch being disabled as well.

Do you enable the 'Advanced performance' option on the HD's within Vista at all?

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Posted: 11-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChiefNuts

Do you enable the 'Advanced performance' option on the HD's within Vista at all?

I don't, but the drives are connected to a hardware RAID card which has its own cache. So there is really no point in enabling it on the drive itself, but i would if the drive was connected to the motherboards SATA controller.
Swiching off drive indexing is also very important.

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Posted: 14-12-2008

skawn (CD Freaks Member): Posts: 101

I am looking for a new RAID config and came upon this post. SSD is still an expensive thing for the moment.
What disk can be compared to it? A quiet one

I've got 2x Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB (WD5000AAKS) in mind but they make a lot of noise.

What else?

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Posted: 14-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Quote:

Originally Posted by skawn

I am looking for a new RAID config and came upon this post. SSD is still an expensive thing for the moment.
What disk can be compared to it? A quiet one

I've got 2x Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB (WD5000AAKS) in mind but they make a lot of noise.

What else?

You just can't compare SSD on hardware RAID to any traditional hard drives, if the OS is installed to the RAID array. The WD Veloicraptors are probably the fastest of the mainstream traditional hard drives and, these two SSD drives just leave them for dead.

It difficult to explain how these SSD feel in real world use. The closest i could come to explaining the performance although a bit of an exaggeration. It's like having 128GB of ram in your PC (if it was possible) and your OS and all your applications loaded into that RAM. The applications just load instantly and silently. Thats the closest i can come to explaining the difference of SSD Vs traditional hard drives. If you ever use an similar setup to the one in this thread. You will never wish to go back to traditional hard drives.

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Posted: 15-12-2008

debro (Blown to smitherines): Posts: 11,455

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee-27

Like going from a Quad Core CPU with 4GB+ Ram back to a single Core CPU with 512MB ram.

There ya go

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Posted: 20-12-2008

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Quote:

Originally Posted by debro

Like going from a Quad Core CPU with 4GB+ Ram back to a single Core CPU with 512MB ram.

There ya go

hehe. That's a nice way of describing it.

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Posted: 21-12-2008

Kenshin (CDFreaks Resident): Posts: 12,722

It's what I call the progress of a certain, predictable future, only delayed.

I now have E5200 on a G31 board. HDD's long outdated PATA 40GB, probably consisted of 20GB platters. But I still run Vista instead of 98 SE.

Too bad Gigabyte I-RAM II never appeared now that DDR II's so cheap. People used to spend US$500 for 4GB DDR-based I-RAM, or US$1,000 to RAID two 4GB cards. Windows XP on a 8GB DDR-SATA was indeed fast at US$1000 cost per system but hardly any extra space for applications and temporary files.

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Posted: 21-12-2008

Kenshin (CDFreaks Resident): Posts: 12,722

Someone near my home is selling OCZ Core V2 64GB for 220,000 KRW (which is 119.75 Euro, 113.43 GBP, or 170.54 USD.) 2.5-inch form factor, SATA II, it's a great upgrade for an Atom dual-core notebook.

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Posted: 21-01-2009

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Another couple of benchmarks thrown in.

Pic 1
Seagate 500GB 7200 series 10

Pic2 The RAID SSD drives.

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	HDTune_Random_Access_ST3500630AS.png (66.4 KB, 78 views)
	HDTune_Random_Access_Adaptec_Array.png (59.2 KB, 76 views)

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Posted: 11-02-2009

Relic (New on Forum): Posts: 2

Thank you for this insightful review and a bunch of helpful comments from everyone else. I am putting together a system at the moment and stumbled upon this setup which convinced me I need to do the same.

NEED! :-)

I've spent a few days so far reading up on what has happened since I last put together a gaming rig, and much as I enjoy it I do run in to some areas where I simply don't know where to look.

I have three questions I hope you can help me with (and anyone else considering such a system).
1) From the comments I understand there is something regarding PCI-Express I need to look out for, both with regards to the number of slots available and any speed drops as a result of going beyond the primary slot.
If I want to use a RAID card like the Adaptec mentioned here, and also run an SLI setup, what should I be looking for on a motherboard to ensure that I can install those components without sacrificing speed on either of them?
(Any examples of such a motherboard would be greatly appreciated.)

2) From the bandwidths you mention it looks like a x4 PCIe RAID card would be sufficient for two disks but that three would require a x8, and such a card could also run four disks. Do you share that observation/assumption or am I overlooking something?

3) Basically I know next to nothing about RAID cards and would blindly buy the one you have used here unless you tell me it was overkill and I should get one at half the price. Should I? :-)

Once again thanks for all the knowledge I've got from this review and the comments, it's a real gem.

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Posted: 11-02-2009

Dee (Senior Administrator and Reviewer): Posts: 10,357

Welcome to the forum, Relic.

First of all i have to say this thread is nearly 3 months old, and therefor quite old in terms of SSD development. I recently completed a full review of the new OCZ Apex series drives and these are a good deal faster then the OCZ Core V2 drives in this thread.

You can read it here.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/reviews/OCZ-...es-SSD-review/

Now onto PCI express.
First you have to find out how many lanes your motherboard has.
Here is a rough guide, based on the chipset used in the motherboard.

P35 = 20 PCIe lanes
1 x16 lane
4 x1 lanes or 1 x4 lane (shared)

P45 = 32 lanes
2 x16 lanes
or 1 x16 lane - 1 x8 lane + PCIe x1 or x4 lanes

X38/X48/X58 = 36 lanes
2 x16 lanes
1 x4 lane or 4 x1 lanes

Now RAID cards
x8 cards have approx 2GB/s bandwidth
x4 cards have approx 1GB/s bandwidth
x1 cards have approx 250MB/s bandwidth

Having an x8 card doesn't mean you can add, let's say 8 SSD drives to max it out. It depends on the power of the IOP (ROC Raid on a chip)
For the Adaptec 2405 card that i used in the review. It has enough processing power to run 4x Core V2 SSD, but it doesn't have enough power to run 4x Apex SSD, in fact, 2x Apex drives is as much as it can handle. Adding a third drive made the card get very hot and unstable.

Where the Apex series drives really score is, they are also very fast as a single drive connected to the motherboards onboard SATA. That makes the purchase cheaper.

Also worth considering is the next drive up. The OCZ Vertex, which should be available near the end of the month. This is altogether a much more advanced drive and much more likely to give great results as a single drive. In fact, much faster than two WD Velociraptors in RAID 0.

Back to your original questions.
You may be able to get an x8 PCIe RAID card working with SLI/Crossfire graphics on an Intel x38/x48/x58 chipset board, without slowing down the SLI/Crossfire.

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Posted: 11-02-2009

Relic (New on Forum): Posts: 2

Thanks for all the info, it made my decision very easy.

My original reason for wanting to get a RAID card was for speed and to eliminate the stutter. The single Apex disk looks like a very good alternative to the striped setup and since the stutter is eliminated I don't need the cache. I will miss out on the distinct advantage on the few occasions that I do video editing but mainly I'm after gaming and application load times, and even if it isn't the top the Apex is still ridiculously fast. :-)

Taking into account that I might have trouble combining RAID and SLI, as well as the higher price, and the Apex becomes an obvious choice to me.

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Posted: 12-02-2009

Kenshin (CDFreaks Resident): Posts: 12,722

MLC-based SSD drives are much cheaper now.

South Korean prices (for used) are like this:

64GB MLC SSD = US$120

64GB SLC SSD = US$250

Though I don't know the exact currency rate of today because the rate's been so terribly changing these days.

Hm, recently I thought of buying one of the 64GB or 128GB SSD drives, but instead I got a used Intel Pentium D 920 processor plus a Samsung F1 1GB and Asus P5LD2 motherboard to build a secondary PC. I hope to have at least one SSD for every PC and notebook I use soon.

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