I've had 1 SSD for a while as a gaming drive, and picked up another one recently. My original intent was to raid the two together (stripe), make it my boot drive, and setup backups to another drive. Then, I found out my motherboard doesn't support raid (ich7 chipset). Is it possible to setup a Windows 7 software raid stripe to boot from? If so, how?
googling about i found this: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#intel-ich7 With time, effort, swearing and a lot of facepalming you should probably be able to keep it going. However, using RAID0 SSDs is pretty hardcore new tech, and my general advice would be to get a more recent platform first, before you get into this. It will always be a gimped solution, A decent e5200 and a simple P35 or P45 motherboard should do just fine, and they can be had second hand for next to nothing now. Go for that, plug in the drives, configure raid, and presto. In fact, i'd say the effort you would have to put into getting it to work on the ICH7 would be better spent mowing a few lawns to pay for the upgrade, that's the kind of trouble you are looking for now.
Hmmm. Wait for payday and go buy a new motherboard with raid, or geek out for the weekend and see if I can make it work. My job is actually data recovery and computer repair. The idea of a linux raid with windows on it crossed my mind, I may poke around a bit more. I bought my board in April, I was very surprised that it didn't have raid support.
Onboard RAID hasn't been a standard for so long, but it certainly feels that way. I do technical support for motherboards, and you'd be amazed at what people put together and then expect to work, because te connector fits. Blue-ray drives on early sata 1.0 chips, Homebrew BIOS roms, software linux RAID on a... oh. Well, good luck i guess. With these things it's always worth concidering if you are doing it because you just want or need it to work, or you like the challenge of it. I always cite one of the major advantages of watercooling as being that it's just so much fun to fiddle with. Not for everyone, but if that's you, then go for it! Oh, and let me know how it went, i am a tiny bit curious about this, i must admit
Won't you lose TRIM support going RAID0? Also, applying firmware updates to the individual drives turn into a total pain. I'd personally stick with individual drives, one for the boot / data and the other for apps. Since the majority of file operations involved with the OS are random reads / writes, a RAID0 setup won't improve the boot / responsiveness enough to warrant the extra hassle (totally IMO, obv). Cheers, SouperAndy
Only Intel's drives support TRIM in RAID at the moment. I would suggest not using RAID 0/1 with SSDs until TRIM comes as standard within it, otherwise you will end up with quite severe performance degredation.
See saint? it would make no sense AT ALL to do this. Now get to work! Somehow, i've not taken a liking to the project, just for the cheesecake value of it
Ha! Good to know that TRIM doesn't work on RAID. I wasn't really going for the normal performance benefit of a stripe anyway, I more wanted to two SSDs to act as one volume so I could fit Windows and my games onto it without splitting where I pointed my installers to. Does spanning in Win 7 mess up trim like a raid would? If not, I could do a 15-20GB Windows partition and span the rest for apps, user data, etc.
If I remember correctly, you can only span/extend simple volumes (which must be on a dynamic drive) and Windows must be installed to a primary partition (which can only be put on a drive that is basic).
Well, I ended up putting Win 7, WoW, and SC2 on one SSD, and Steam on the other SSD with all its installs. Seems to be working fine. Thanks everyone for the help.
