Just bought two Corsair P256 CMFSSD-256GBG2D Solid State Drives.

I am going to install them in a RAID-0 config on a Win7 machine to appear as 1 Half-TB drive.

I am curious as to what performance increase I will see versus standard HDD's in RAID-0 or a single SSD drive.


-Skater

You'll be bottlenecking other parts of the system.

From what I've seen, the decrease in boot time (as one example) for a SSD compared to a HDD is not directly relational to the increase in drive speed. It's a hell of a lot faster, but there's already some brakes in it with the rest of the system and likely even software.

But let us know what happens. Of course such a setup means paying the extra 100% for the last 10% speed increase, but if money is no worry...

Well... I don't pay for my hardware. This $1400 purchase was on the company for "testing" purposes.

R&D...

QA...

Whatever you want to call it. lol

I know what you mean though... I might just build a whole new system to try and remove the bottlenecks as much as possible through top of the line hardware...

We'll see...

-Skater

RS, you were totally right about the other bottlenecks...

The Disk data transfer rate is off the chart, and the rest of the system, while very high, is a lot slower...



-Skater

I don't understand your disappointment. There's always going to be a lowest common denominator in a system that bottlenecks the performance. What matters now is that you have raised the ceiling for maximum performance. If you'd stuck with a mechanical drive your CPU and memory would be fiddling their thumbs waiting for data to arrive. Then your performance ceiling would be much, much lower.

The only cause for concern is whether the surely impressive amount that you spent on raid was put to good use, since your components may (and I stress "may") not be able to keep up with your file operations rate. A single SSD might have done the job just as well. But I don't know. A few quick benchmarks could answer that question.

Also, ever since Vista Microsoft has clusterducked file operations in the OS, god knows how or why. All I know is that it takes longer to copy, move and delete things than XP (this suspicion has been verified by my trusty stopwatch). So maybe the increased speed due to the SSD's has saved you some frustration already.

Phoenix, I'm not disappointed at all. I am just surprised that the SSD's are that much faster. Previous disk rating was 6.1, and that was with Raptors in RAID 0.

My surprise stems from the fact that SSD's are so fast, I now notice latency from things like video and memory, when I did not before.

Disk operations are now almost instantaneous... Installation of W7U x64... 6 mins following the expansion of files (installation routine copies compressed files from DVD to SSD, and then uncompresses them). This is literally 5 times faster than normal.

Overall, I am very impressed. I now have to look for ways to increase the speed of the other components of the system. Maybe I will get a Core i7 and DDR3 memory for the next system...

For the record, I don't spend money on 99% of my hardware. My company allows me a generous hardware budget, with the requirement that I use and test all types of hardware. I also get to keep most of it. Hard to say no to a deal like that. LOL

However, should I have had to pay for the SSD's... I would not have done it. Right now, the price is still too high vs. the performance gain.

Also, in W7, disk I/O is now better than it was in XP. Vista porked it up with too many data checks that slowed actualized disk I/O to a crawl. That is fixed completely in W7 for large and small transfers alike.


-Skater

I am thinking about an SSD at Tax time. I REALLY want to mod my Cougar though to extend it's life.

I wish I had more confidence in my ability to upgrade them. If I had the cash for all of the expensive mods I would still hesitate as I would hate to "brick" any of it because I am not experienced with electronics.

In my opinion a single SSD (like I ordered) is a good deal, if you still can spend enough budget on the other system components. In my case: Mobo + CPU = 300EUR, SSD = 300EUR, GFX = 300EUR, so my spending is very even between Disk Speed, Core Speed and GFX Speed - which suits me fine for a system that will do a lot of gaming, but also a lot of work (picture editing). But I wouldn't reduce CPU or GFX just to fit an SSD in. At ten years manufacturer warranty, I'm also not concerned about long-term investment of that much cash for a single drive.

Skater, I'd be curious what difference the Raid0 (removing it and going single-drive) actually makes. I'm sure you picked a high quality Raid Adapter, otherwise I could see it being unable to really feed the SSDs with the highest speed. I would guess if you run it single SSD, you'll still get a 7.0 or 7.3 index out of it, perfectly on par with the rest of the system.

One other thing to consider: By default, a "failing" SSD (one that runs out of write cycles on all cells) will become a read-only drive which should make Data recovery nice and simple. I'm not sure the same would work in a Raid0 config.

My index speed was 5.9 in disk performance running two 320Gb 16Mb Seagates in RAID 0. Nvidia chipsets are notorious for not being good at RAID speed though. My mobo is a P5N-E SLI. Since Win 7 supports Nvidia RAID with no jumping through hoops like a floppy or slipstreaming the drivers, I thought I would give it a try. Anyone else have a disk performance they would like to share.

Oooh, now you're talking; ask your company if you can sign me on as "verifier" for your tests . Seriously though, I'd like to enter just one caveat. Your SSD bandwidth, even in RAID, will never approach your maximum memory bandwidth. Then again, there are too many other factors to consider (like what other devices are moving data in and out of memory, and how often) to determine what kind of scaling you'll get buying a new CPU. There's sure to be some, it just may not be as huge as you think. You could try finding some different CPU benchmarks done on a system with an SSD to get an idea of what you'll end up with.



I have been looking for an answer to this for awhile. RC1 still suffered from this problem, nice to see they got it worked out. Thanks!