Intel X25-V in RAID-0: Faster than X25-M G2 for $250?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 29, 2010 8:59 PM ESTFinal Words
While I can't say that I like the idea of giving up TRIM support, the performance you get out of a pair of X25-Vs in RAID 0 is impressive. You effectively get next-generation controller performance out of a tweaked version of a 2 year old SSD. The lack of TRIM does bother me, but I personally use an X25-M G2 under OS X without TRIM and the drive is resilient enough (most of the time) to not make me feel any performance degradation.
Given the price point and the well behaved nature of these drives, I'd say it's definitely worth your consideration. If you like the simplicity of a single drive setup or want to hang on to TRIM support (perhaps if you do know your workload is more random than normal), by all means go for a single G2 or one of the SandForce offerings. However, if you're fine dealing with a potentially more complex setup (if one of your X25-Vs dies, you lose all your data) and don't mind giving up TRIM, this is a great option. The X25-V RAID 0 route gives you all of the Intel SSD safety net while posting some very competitive numbers. At $250 it may be the best overall performance you get out of an SSD at this price point until Intel's 3rd generation drives ship in Q4.
It's high performance on a budget, not without its tradeoffs, but in this case they may be livable.
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GullLars - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
I think TRIM works i IDE mode also, i remember reading that both drivers PCIIDE and MSAHCI supports TRIM. However, this is not the big problem with using IDE mode, the problem is the loss of NCQ, so your performance don't scale with load. Your SSD will essentially only be able to do about 20MB/s at 4KB random read, while it can do 120MB/s random read with NCQ enabled (at fairly high load, like launching multiple apps simultaneously).buzznut - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Thanks for the reply. I have been considering getting a new mobo anyway, I think I'd like to get a 890gx with the new interfaces.Only pb there is I have ddr2 ram and am2 cpus. doh
Guess I'll wait til some money comes in to do any upgrading...
Elganja - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
"Update (03/29/2010): Intel has recently released a new driver that allows Windows 7’s TRIM instructions to be passed through the Southbridge. The new driver is labeled "Rapid Storage Technology 9.6" and it can be found here. These drivers are also able to pass TRIM commands to RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays. "jed22281 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
TT is mistaken, there is no support for drives combined into RAID volumes.There is for individual drives connected to the controller while it's in RAID mode.
http://www.intel.com//support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-...
Also see
http://communities.intel.com/community/tech/solids...
Look for the gold star at the top of the page, select show details and then go to announcement 2.
"Intel® RST 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI and pass through modes for RAID. A bug has been submitted to change the string that indicates TRIM is supported on RAID volumes (0, 1, 5, 10). Intel is continuing to investigate the ability of providing TRIM support for all RAID volumes in a future release."
Chloiber - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
A colleague from another HW site asked Intel directly. It's definitely NOT SUPPORTED (just to point that out again). It's clearly a mistake of intel, as they didn't make themselves clear in the change logs/readmes and even in the rapid storage manager itself it's not clear.Here is what they said btw:
"It will support TRIM with SSDs in an AHCI configuration, or with the RAID controller enabled and the SSD is used as a pass through device. An example of this use case is for users that want to use the SSD as a boot drive but still be able to RAID multiple HDDs together to allow for large protect data storage – a great use for the home theater PC."
No RAID0 or anything. "Just" simple TRIM as we're used to from the MSAHCI drivers.
Elganja - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
The quote was from this article: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3116/tweaktown_s...morphin1 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
What do you mean by doing sequential write?How would you do that?
Also will this apply to the new Sony Vaio Z series laptops SSD's that come in Raid 0 config?
Is it recommended to buy a laptop in Raid 0 config with SSD's as over time they might become snails.
Do you see the chance of Trim being supported on current SSD's in the near future?
Thanks a lot in advance.
GullLars - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Sequential writes are the type of writes that typically occur when you save or copy large files (1MB or larger).As for RAID in sony Vaio. There is no way of telling if it will become snail-like whitout knowing wich SSD is in the laptop in question. If it's Intel, Sandforce, or C300, it sould be just fine, if it's some low-quality cheap SSD from last generation drives, or the crap they put in the netbooks last year, it will go really bad.
jed22281 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
You mean if it's:Postville (Intel), SF-1200/1500 (Sandforce), C300 (JMicron), or Barefoot (Indilinx)
GullLars - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
I forgot barefoot, my bad.