Advice needed - RAID 0 SSDs for boot drive

[Triniman]

I have all my parts, (save for the monitor), but I need help with the steps required in order to RAID 0 two SSDs in order to have one boot drive Win 7.

Do I need to manually load any drivers from a flash drive in order to RAID the drives?

Motherboard - ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe.

Thanks in advance.
Triniman

[dandelioneater]

You will most likely have to load drivers in order for windows to see the raid volume.

First you have to enable raid in the bios - should be under sata controller settings. You want to select RAID. The other options are AHCI, IDE, etc.

Then reboot, and hit "cntrl - i " to bring up the intel raid screen. (I think it is "cntrl - i")

Once there you have to select the type of array that you want for your drives. If you want raid 0, then select striped array. Im not sure what the best size is in Kb. I've always used 128.

Once you have the array created, you can then go ahead and install windows. It will ask you where you want to install windows to and here is where you need to click 'load driver' so that the raid volume can be detected. Then click the raid array after loading the driver and away you go.

** Keep in mind that at the moment you won't have TRIM functionality on your raid array. So over time the drive's performance may degrade.

[MARSTG]

but I would advise against raid 0 on SSDs. Just sell both of them and get a larger one, double the size of the 2. That is software raid not hardware. You want a lightning fast SSD for boot I would strongly advise you get a bootable PCIe SSD style OCZ Revo Drive.
Revo Drive 120GB is as low as 110$ on newegg.ca

[BlueByte]

2 drive raid 0 should still be fine on an Intel raid setup. If you go past that you will want an addin card. The amd onboard raid will suffer even under 2 drives. Raid 0 does not really push the raid system like raid 5 or 6, even a cheap hba card will be powerful enough to push 6-8 ssds in raid 0.

[Phill]

AFAIK Win 7 will have its own raid driver for Intel RAID. When you go to install the OS it should see the array that you created.

I ran raid 0 for years, you know back before SSDs. Once SSDs arrived I ran them in RAID 0 too. First was OCZ Agility 60GB in raid zero. Man was that expensive but quick(compared to HDDs)! Then I ran Agility 2 60GB in RAID 0. Then Solid 2 120GB in zero. Now I run a single Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB. Point is that all those years I ran RAID 0 be it with HDDs or SSDs it was always off of the Intel controller on the motherboard. I never really had any issues either... now that Intel drivers now support TRIM with RAID 0 (note: only on select chipsets) I can see RAID 0 with SSDs as a palatable solution for an OS setup.

I would say go for RAID 0 just make sure crucial data is stored redundantly on other drives.

[AkG]

Guys....the OP has an Intel 7 series mobo....The latest Intel RST drivers SUPPORT TRIM in RAID 0 on Z77 mobos.

AnandTech - Intel Brings TRIM to RAID-0 SSD Arrays on 7-Series Motherboards, We Test It

Use the two SSDs you got...and later upgrade to one larger as you will be hit with a rather larger latency penalty by going raid 0...and I am not a fond lover of consumer level 'software' raid solutions.

[Phill]

I upgraded the RAID ROM on my P8P67 Deluxe board bios to 11.0.0.1124. It my understanding and correct me if I am wrong that I should be able to expect TRIM commands to be fully functional for RAID 0 with the use of RST 11.2 or newer.

[dandelioneater]

I had heard rumors of upcoming RAID 0 TRIM support with new intel chipsets, but was unaware that it was currently available. Oops.

[homer98]

Hey Phill, you should double check, I think TRIM is only RAID supported for 7-Series chipsets per the article, so even though you can update to 11.2, might want to make sure that it will be active for your mobo.

[Phill]

It has been awile since I looked into it and so I am a little foggy on the topic. IIRC only the 7-Series chipsets were shipping with Intel raid rom 11.0 or newer. It is the combination of have a supported RAID ROM module in the bios and then using RST 11.0 or newer drivers. (Please correct me if I am wrong on this). Intel does not want to have to validate all the potential bios' for older chipsets if they were to update the RAID ROM modules for boards older than 7-Series chipsets. It my understanding then that if I personally mod my bios with an updated ROM I too will have TRIM support with RAID 0.