Recently, I have purchased 2 additional OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSDs. That brings my total to 4 SSDs. I currently have the first 2 in Raid 0 using the onboard raid from my Asus Maximus V Gene motherboard. I didn't realize, but the other two SATA 3.0 ports are "extra" therefore not detected within the BIOS. So, my question, or rather questions... 1) How much would using 2xSATA 2.0 and 2xSATA 3.0 affect Raid 0 performance? I would rather all 4 SSDs use SATA 3.0 ports. 2) What is a good Raid Controller Card that has 4xSATA 3.0? Would prefer it used PCIe x4, but I do have an open PCIe x16. 3) If I go with a raid card, what would be my best raid setup to use? Raid 0? Raid 0+1? Raid 1+0? Raid 5? I don't require the 512GB of storage, I am just looking for the performance benefit, though, having an automatic backup sounds amazing. Thank you, in advance, for any and all help.
1. You won't see much real world difference between sata 2 and 3, it will show on the benchmarks though, but other than that not allot of differnce. 2. I got no experience with raid cards but I see allot of people with Highpoint raid cards. 3. Raid 0 will give you the most preformance I think, but the difference between raid 0 and 10 will not be allot I think, 10 will give you the most bennefits but will decrease your storrage space ofcourse, I'm pritty sure people have done bench marks about raid 1 vs 0 vs 10 vs 5.
putting 2 of those on Sata II controllers would limit all 4 to the Sata II speeds, so you'd get 4x265MB/s read/write speeds. 4k reads and writes could possibly be snappier though.
you should be able to set up the hard drives on the AS Media sata 6gbs controller - whilst its not as quick as the onboard intel one , its still better than the POS marvell 9128. but you wont be able to run 4 x ssd`s in 1 raid 0 array , spanning 2 controllers - the best would be 2 x raid 0 arrays. as for setting it up http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1155/Maximus_V_GENE/#download have a looky at the manual ;D
^^ this, you will not be gaining any kind of "automatic backup". in a RAID 1 array you get a mirrored disk. RAID is for redundancy and not a backup. Case in point - my friend had a NAS box that was a 4tb box, with a 2tb RAID 1 array. Well, 2 weeks ago in a storm the box surged quite badly, and took out both the disks. He didn't back it up - as he was saying the box is backed up to itself (ie. mirrored) - now needless to say, he hasn't got any of the information.
Another case in point -- we have a critical database server at work which has RAID1 disks. One day the server wouldn't respond anymore. We found out that both disks had failed. Backups had also stopped working about a year earlier for some reason. We ended up paying €10k for data recovery.
At work I've worked primarily with mdraid (software RAID in gnu linux), and adaptec controllers. What OS are you planning on using? And are you planning on putting the OS on the array? Putting an OS on a software array can require a bit more effort than using a 'well-supported' hardware controller. RAID 0 will almost always provide the best read and write performance. Software RAID has some benefits in that there's no hardware RAID controller that could die, and that it may be easier to get a hold of outdated software than outdated hardware (I've heard that if a hw RAID controller dies, it can sometimes be tricky to find a controller compatible with the metadata on the drives). Hardware controllers are usually faster than software controllers. Something you may want to consider is a hybrid of magnetic hard drives and SSDs. Many new hw controllers and some software RAID implementations (such as mdraid) support combing magnetic drives and SSDs (I believe in some configuration they basically have data mirrored across sets of magnetic drives and SSDs; data is written to both, and reads go to SSDs first, then to another if the read fails). Other's have mentioned that RAID is not a backup, and yeah, it's not a backup. Even with RAID 1, data can become corrupted on both of the mirrors (for example: as a side effect of storage media 'decaying'; it's sometimes called 'bit rot'). A process called 'data scrubbing' can help protect arrays from that. I hope that helps some.
