RAID 0 on old SSD

[PandaBear]

Got 2 retired SSD from work that they are throwing away (OCZ Vertex 2 50GB), so small and worthless that it is useless to run by itself so I RAID 0 them using my motherboard's RAID.

I was expecting a lot of speed, but it looks like just slightly faster than when I was running a RAID 0 of 2 old hard drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 PATA, 120GB each) plus 4 GB of USB drive as ready boost (2 SanDisk Ultra 2GB).

Am I doing it wrong? or is that particular SSD really not that fast?

 

[mazdamonky]

The easiest way to test the speed difference would be to run a software such as Crystal disk mark. But It could be an older model SSD, some of which aren't terribly fast. Also, if it was a heavily used SSD, they do slow down as they wear out.

 

[spackard]

Maybe you're measuring the speed of your ready boost device.

 

[mk378]

Yeah USB drives are notoriously slow.

If they support it, you should run a secure erase on the SSDs, that will pre-erase all the sectors and could give you faster writing for a while.

 

[r0dISK]

Not recommend RAID 0 but we recommend using RAID 1, data is protected against disk failure and data read speed will be as RAID 0
+
use RAID 1 for Swap and ReadyBoost...

50G SSD

 

[punisher]

Don't expect good numbers from RAID 0 SSDs. Software RAID 0 setups in conjunction with SSDs are often disappointing. Depending on the motherboard chipset controlling you SATA RAID, it could be disabling functions on the SSD controller (Sandforce/Indilinx ?) that would otherwise be used to make the drive faster independent of a RAID 0 setup.

 

[PandaBear]

No RAID1, the current setup in RAID 0 is already small enough at 97GB for boot drive. I can do JBOD instead of RAID0 but I'm not sure if it is going to make it faster or slower either. The motherboard RAID is on the AMD SB710 chipset (I think), with a Phenom II X4, so it is not really a speed demon either.

It turns out that my partition isn't aligned right as well, and while using miniTool to align it the system got corrupted. Lucky I still have my HDD to clone from again, but that'll take another night.

 

[PandaBear]

After alignment this is what I got:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 296.347 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 136.886 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 48.208 MB/s [ 11769.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 120.895 MB/s [ 29515.4 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 276.016 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 138.214 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 17.805 MB/s [ 4346.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 60.536 MB/s [ 14779.3 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 80.2% (73.1/91.1 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/08/24 2:35:38
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

[simple_gifts]

Old computer equipment is just that, old.

I used to squirrel away old stuff, but a few years go by and a stack of 72Gb SCSI drives just aren't worth the electricity needed to keep them spinning.

We have some new R730s @ work and a 6 disk RAID10 array w/ 15K SAS gives us about 1.3Gb/sec with sequential write of a 30Gb file.