Super Slow Boot on RAID0 SSDs

Finally got my 2 Intel SSDs. I have them running in RAID0, got Windows 7 up and running. The cards are very held back by the ob board raid, so I may get a CARD as soon as I can afford it.

Anyways, the biggest problem of all is the boot times. The boot times have pretty much doubled or tippled over my WD 1 TB Black. I was expecting 10-15 second boot times, not 2-3 Minuets.

The only thing I can think of might be that I havent installed the driver for the RAID set up. Seems I need a floppy for this, is that so? Is it likely the driver is the problem?

My mobo is a P55-GD65.

 

The RAID drivers are included in the nVidia chipset drivers pack...there is also a management utility included, but you would be better of sticking with the BIOS config menu. I'm guessing that your software RAID is the problem; you would probably get better performance from running just one drive with the RAID dissabled.

 

The MSI doesnt have nVidia chipset, its Intel.

I messed with the bios a bit, and some how i managed to get the boot time to roughly that of the WD 1 TB Black. I think its slightly faster.

As for one drive, well I asked awhile back here about the RAID and had no complaints. Besides I dont think 80 GB is enough for my OS/Apss/Games.

 

My bad...I must've seached for the wrong board to get the specs.

I would be interested in the speeds you are getting with RAID0...I know that on nVidia, AMD, Adaptec, and SIL software raid, a 2-drive RAID0 is actualy slower than just one drive without RAID...though it will appear to be faster on a mostly blank drive. Perhapse with Intel drives and an intel chipset, this is not the case.

 

Ill post some HDD Benchmarks soon, or tomorrow at the latest.

Based purely on visual observations everything loads pretty fast but I havent gotten time to load up all my apps. It has been a year since I did a clean install and since then I have upgraded Vista to Win 7, and undergone a few hardware changes. Figured now was the time.

Now just how fast do they load, well its noticeably faster then my WD 1 TB Black. I wouldnt say extremely faster, but keep in mind the WD was housing my OS and about 400 GB of media and such.

Now I was told to go software raid on these, for a reason I cant recall atm. Looking/Thinking into it more, since the SSDs are held back based on SATA II standards, would a RAID card make any difference since there still utilizing the SATA II ports on the PCI card?


EDIT:
SSD:
http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/3843/ssdread.jpg
WD 1 TB Black
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/1979/wdread.jpg

The results were better then I thought, and keep in mind this is with my normal background processes running like CoreTemp,Nod32,Comodo Firewall and a few others, nor is this a fresh drive like you would usually see in benchmarks. ATM about 35 GB of the drive is in use. So I'm sure this is why the marks fell short of what you find in some other benchmarks.

 

I'm a little confused regarding software vs. hardware RAID. Are the on-board Intel chipset-based RAID controllers (e.g., P55) considered hardware or software?

Dick

 

Any raid doen directly though the SATA ports on the mobo are software raids. So both the Intel,Nvidia,etc are software raids. Only when you add a hard drive controller to a PCI slot does it become a hardware raid. Even then for a true RAID experience a proper raid card runs about $300 USD for one that has it's own processor and memory on it.

One particular area I have noticed a huge increase in performance is when installing games/apps mounted through Daemon tools.

 

Thanks. I learn a little more from you folks every day.

Dick

 

No problem.

 

Your transfer speeds are nice, but they don't seem to be any faster than those of a single drive, in fact they are a bit lower than I would expect from a single drive. (based on intel's specs, shouldn't the peaks be at about 250MBPS?)

No, SSDs are not held back by RAID cards, or by any SATA ports, as the fastest SSDs top out at about 280MBPS, and the ports support 300MBPS. Most mainboards (and some RAID cards) only give 4 PCIe channels for 4 SATA ports. Since a PCIe channel is only 250MBPS, this can theoreticaly slow down drives a little...for example, if you had 4 drives that were all faster than 250MBPS, and were all being used at once. This is why the better PCIe raid cards are all x8 or x16. SSDs do tend to have slightly higher response times on RAID due to the fact that there is more circuitry involved...the difference is almost undetectable, and is completely unnoticable durring use.

Also, there are a few mainboards with onboard hardware RAID...but they are mostly just for severs; and they are rarely ATX. Plus, they cost as much as buying a mainboard and then buying a RAID card seperately...and they still are not as good as a nice LSI, 3Ware, etc...

 

The peak was 234Mbps. The Intel specs state "up to" 250Mbps, but you know how that is, never a guarantee you going to hit those speeds.

I was reading an article today about manufactures making PCIe based SSDs as this bypass the limits of SSDs when using SATA ports.I find it a bit hard to believe they top at 280, but the intels do top out at 250.

 

The intels are the fastest SATA SSDs right now...their fastest G2 series SSD has a top speed of "up to" 280MBPS.

The companies making SSD cards are bypassing 2 steps in the hardware in order to keep access times low. When you build it as a card, you don't need to go convert from the SSD to the SATA, and you don't need to convert from the SATA to the PCIe...you can go strait from the SSD to the PCIe. Also, you can make some optimizations that cannot be made with a SATA/SAS card because they would make the card useless with all but one model of drive. From what I have seen, these cards are very fast, and have very low responce times...but they are still not as fast as the 24-drive SSD arrays in terms of MBPS, and they are only a few percent faster in access times. It should go without saying that a SSD-card takes up less space and uses less power. They also cost less than 24-drive arrays; but then the 24-drive arrays are about twice as fast, and have more than twice the capacity. In the end, the difference is that the card has drives built into the RAID card, and the RAID card/drives method seperates them...but both methods are hardware RAID; even if you don't get to made adjustments with the SSD-card.

 

Sadly, the controllers for a lot of Core i5 boards seem to have compatibility issues with the Intel SSDs. All I can perhaps suggest is to buy a PCI express 1x S-ATA controller. They won't be cheap, however.

 

I wish some one would have mentioned these things when I brought up getting SSDs for my build..

 

I'm afraid I've only just found this out myself, it puts a spanner in the works for me too. Not sure what I'll do about it, if anything.

 

It would be nice if there was some way to identify those boards that are SSD-compatible vs. those that aren't (other than buying one and testing it).

Dick

 

As far as I could gather, it was something to do with the Intel controller itself, rather than a specific board. As far as I'm aware boards with secondary controllers such as the Marvell controllers offered on Gigabyte boards, don't suffer the issue.

 

Where did you come about this info from Sam?

Personally I havent had any problems per say, just the fact that they don't max out, and boot wise there nothing to brag about in my case. Seeing as the read times are about twice that of the WD 1 TB Black I was using previously as an OS, I can't quite understand what is holding back the boot times unless its something to do with the RAID as software vs hardware.

I may run a back up tomorrow, and see about testing out a single drive vs an array for the sake of testing boot times.

What RAID cards do you guys think would be good for this set up?

 

Thanks, Sam. If you find out anything else regarding this I would appreciate your keeping this Topic updated. This is most curious.

Dick

 

I don't have any manufacturer hard evidence, it's mainly coming from forum comments and newegg reviews. I sort-of disregarded them until this thread showed up. As far as boot times go, they won't be substantially altered with Win7/Vista as unlike XP, very little is loaded from the HDD before bootup, it is almost all driver loading. The loading occurs once you've logged in. That is where you're looking for performance benefits.