I need to know what is the best strip size for my 2x X25-M 160 GB G2 Raid 0 on my Dell laptop M6500.
The laptop will be used for general web browsing, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Visual Studio and other smaller programs.
I tried 64 kb based on some research that I read some time ago. Then I read that 128 kb was better. I tried that and the boot up times were substantially better than with 64 kb. Which makes sense. Because booting up implies, I believe, large sequential reads, which are performed faster if the strips are of larger size.
Now I read in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology Help that the default Strip size is 16 kB for Solid state disks, which seems to imply that 16 kB is the recommended one.
RAID 0
RAID 5
RAID 10
Default
SATA disks
128 KB
64 KB
64 KB
Solid state disks
16 KB
128 KB
16 KB
Options
4 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB, 64 KB, 128 KB.
16 KB, 32 KB, 64 KB, 128 KB.
4 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB, 64 KB.
When I start the array configuration menu, the default Strip size shown is 128 kB, it does show the models and serial numbers of the drives, so the controller does know that they are SSDs, but the default strip size of 128 kB is very different from the 16 kB mentioned above.
Thanks,
Antonio
