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Why such SLOW write times with 3x X25-M RAID 0?

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I've got three 80 GB X25-M SSDs in RAID 0 using the SATA RAID option on my motherboard (Intel ICH10R.) I flashed the drives to the latest firmware on 3-4-10. I am using Vista64 on an i7-920 system.

READ speed is fantastic; 4k WRITE speed is DISMAL - like 4 mb/sec - OR LESS- no matter what benchmark I use. Using AS SSD benchmark I get the following results- What am I doing wrong? Is there some setting I goofed up somehow? I spent $650 on these drives and my system is WAY SLOWER now than it was with a WD Raptor!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I suspect your partitions are not properly aligned to erase boundaries based on the screenshot of AS SSD (31k - BAD).

Use this calculator to figure out proper alignment for your disks and then repartition:

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

View solution in original post

15 REPLIES 15

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Well, using RAID you loose the TRIM support. I don't know if you have used those drives before or they are brand new. In any case the performance is very bad. I would suggest you to check each SSD seperately and clean them. Then RAID two of them at a time (try all three combinations 1st with 2nd, 1st with 3rd, 2nd with 3rd) and compare the performance.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

They are brand new drives, less than a week old. Hard to imagine they are worn out already. OS is Vista 64 which doesn't have TRIM anyway. Reviews of these drives in three- and four-drive arrays show much better write performance. I must be doing something wrong. What Intel driver package should I be using? There's Intel MATRIX and also Intel RAPID STORE packages, etc etc but no guidance on which to use when...... I am using what the motherboard mfg. (ASUS) provides on their support download web site... wish I could find someone who has actual knowledge of this.

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

I suspect your partitions are not properly aligned to erase boundaries based on the screenshot of AS SSD (31k - BAD).

Use this calculator to figure out proper alignment for your disks and then repartition:

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/other/157

idata
Esteemed Contributor III

Alignment, OK, I read the articles and learned something new! For certain my drive (fake raid array) does NOT have the "correct" offset, I checked and you were right about that. Whether this is the cause of the performance issue remains to be seen but it certainly seems plausible. It's a bit of work to image the drive, repartition it with the correct offset, then put the system image back on but, OK, I'll give it a shot. I have so much useful software installed that I hate to start with a clean Vista install. I'll report back in a day or two when I accomplish this. Many thanks!