[X5yankee]

Hello all, this is my first post here so hear it goes, I'll jump right into it.
Current setup:
2 60gb SSD's in raid0 AMD motherboard built in raid controller booting Windows 8
500gb HDD for pics, misc data

Basically the 120gb raid0 array was getting a little full so I got 2 more 120gb SSD's for more space. Heres some assumptions to make: 1) all 4 ssd's are of same level of performance (sand force 2281 drives). 2) max performance is my aim. I'm not worried about losing data, I just have the OS, and my applications on the raid array so its just a reinstall. The obvious option is to just setup a new array and reinstall. Initially I figured I'd just sell the 2 60gig drives. Here is where I'm looking for some guidance. Is there anyway to incorporate those 2 60's with, or in addition to the new drives?
i.e. some sort of cache setup to boost performance. Do I have the option to just pool all 4 drives together as 360 gigs of ssd space without a stripe? (Probably slower than 240gb striped?) Should I look into adding a raid controller vs the MB's built in controller? Lastly, is it possible to clone the current raid array and restore it to the larger new raid array. forgive me if I'm mixing terminology up. Thanks for any responses.

[erb]

X5yankee, on 15 March 2013 - 01:29 AM, said:

Hello all, this is my first post here so hear it goes, I'll jump right into it.
Current setup:
2 60gb SSD's in raid0 AMD motherboard built in raid controller booting Windows 8
500gb HDD for pics, misc data

Basically the 120gb raid0 array was getting a little full so I got 2 more 120gb SSD's for more space. Heres some assumptions to make: 1) all 4 ssd's are of same level of performance (sand force 2281 drives). 2) max performance is my aim. I'm not worried about losing data, I just have the OS, and my applications on the raid array so its just a reinstall. The obvious option is to just setup a new array and reinstall. Initially I figured I'd just sell the 2 60gig drives. Here is where I'm looking for some guidance. Is there anyway to incorporate those 2 60's with, or in addition to the new drives?
i.e. some sort of cache setup to boost performance. Do I have the option to just pool all 4 drives together as 360 gigs of ssd space without a stripe? (Probably slower than 240gb striped?) Should I look into adding a raid controller vs the MB's built in controller? Lastly, is it possible to clone the current raid array and restore it to the larger new raid array. forgive me if I'm mixing terminology up. Thanks for any responses.

If your priority is max performance you should have gotten more 60GB SSDs and striped them. I'll guess you only have (2) SATAIII ports? Even if you mixed SATAIII with SATAII, I doubt it would be noticable and the extra SSDs would make up for it.

You can use all 4 SSDs in a spanned array (sometimes called JBOD), but that would be far from max performance.
You can mount those 2 SSDs to a folder? Performance would be better if you have high utilization in a directory and offloaded it to the 60s.

I see no reason to get a hardware RAID controller; RAID0 has very little overhead. Unless you want more reliability. In that case you should also have a UPS for the computer.

Lastly, yes. You can setup the new array and clone to it. Whatever you use to clone will need to see your Intel RAID (drivers). I recommend using Acronis Backup&Recovery v10/v11. Easy to add the drivers to a bootable media. It will resize the partitions, also. While you're at it, run a backup on your system drive so you can just restore to an image instead of reinstall. Or better yet, schedule your backup

[X5yankee]

Ugh...I ended up getting 1 OCZ Vertex 3 240gb. I read some good reviews of it even comparing it to 2 120gb ssd's in raid0. I think for my use of mostly Office and web apps along with some photo editing in Lightroom it should be fine. Those 2 little 60's in raid ran perfectly fine. I was just running out of room. I'm sure the OCZ will compare favorably to those 2. Now the question is how do I move to the single disk?

[erb]

Acronis