nubie: single ssd to bigger 2-disk ssd RAID 0 set, what gotchas?
Hello all,
I bought this product to get an answer to this question.
I have a newish Windows 10 Pro OEM OS installed on a single SSD (.5TB); I wish to transfer this to a 2 disk SSD RAID 0 set (striped-only), 1.0TB. Any thing special to do?
My workflow:
1. Power down; add two more raw SSDs; start up and install the new SSDs as a RAID 0 set, via Windows procedures.
2. In one basic operation, copy entire source software to new RAID set. I know there are individual partitions which need to be established on the new drive, hopefully, as if it was simply a single 1 TB drive.
3. Power down, remove the old single SSD; push the "on" button....and viola, a perfect clone of the old system but now residing a super fast 1TB drive.
Is this doable as is, or are there more steps involved?
Thank you for your attention, -H
Are you talking about using SATA III SSD's? If so you will be disappointed in the performance of a RAID 0 set because you have a bottleneck of the SATA III interface itself having a maximum throughput of 600MBPS. Most modern SSD's as single drives are capable of saturating this interface so adding another as a RAID array will not be to any advantage.
That is so; the types of RAID that work are RAID 1 and RAID 5 - they have redundancy that RAID 0 does not have. RAID 5 slows things down a lot - noticable with mechanical drives, but not with SSDs which can still come up agains the SATA III bottleneck.
Ian
-This is exactly the advice I was looking for.
-If I understand IanL-S's advice in a nutshell: cloning should really be backup and restore, using the Acronis bootable disk. I have a remote Smba share to hold the backup and can restore to the new drive(s).
-Re RAID, I'm aware of the fragility of RAID0 and I'm going to take his advice re OS disks and raid0, I wll raid0 only data disks: For one machine (I'm upgrading a number of computers), I will now start with a new single SSD data disk and measure disk performance on some test files, then add a second disk, RAID them, (re)add the test files and measure performance with the RAID setup. If anything interesting, I will report.
-Other details: SATA3, RAID to be set in the BIOS
Thank you again, -H
Use real world tests to verify the speed of RAID 0 vs a single disk. Benchmarks like ATTO, Crystal Diskmark, Samsung Magician, should all be taken with a grain of salt.
1) They report sequential read/write performance (large files like .iso's that are sequentially written in an entire block of data) and even they will vary greatly among each other and sometimes even when running the same test agains the same disk(s). For the most part, large files will transfer quickly across all SSD's.
2) The real performance of a drive is based on IOPS or random read/writes (4K) which really deals with how it can read/write folders within folders that contain files upon files (OS, applications, etc) that are scattered across the disk.
If you want a real test, right click and copy your user profile to the single SSD and then to the RAID 0 drives. Probably wont' see much difference - maybe a little, but not much. If you're doing some high end modeling, RAID 0 might give you some advantage over long periods of time, but day to day use for the average home user, you probably won't see too much difference.