Agility 2 60Gb SSD raid 0 seems slow

[pabloottawa]

Hey guys,

I just installed 2 Agility 2 60Gb drives in raid 0 and all seems OK. Win 7 boots up fine and fast but I'm noticing that games are NOT loading any faster (perhaps even slower than my HDD raid 0) and they reside on the SSD drives. Did I miss something in the setup? Do I have to adjust something on the drives or the MB bios????

Could it be my stripe size???? I set it to 64Kb but deleted the raid array and formatted the drives until I find out if I should be setting it to 128Kb.


so is there a rule of thumb? As in

60gb drives in raid 0 = 64Kb stripe

or is it

60gb drives in raid 0 = 128Kb stripe


Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[DanTheBanjoman]

I run all my games from the LAN and they still load fast. You probably just expected too much from the SSD's. Could you name some games and their loading times?

[pabloottawa]

Well,

I'm running Bad company 2 and Silent Hunter 5 and I noticed that the load times were either as fast or slightly slower than my HDD raid0 setup.

Off the top of my head I would say the games loaded on the SSD OS were about 5-10 seconds slower.

ON SILENT HUNTER 5..... The load times were MUCH MUCH slower I'd say by almost a minute.

Very strange....

[fullinfusion]

did you partition the drives so they are aligned to 1024k?

[pabloottawa]

I guess not because I have no clue what you're talking about lol..... How would you do that?

[pabloottawa]

If you're referring to Allocation Size unit, yes I just reformatted both drives and set them to 1024

[fullinfusion]

not sure about a raid 0 set up, but either windows 7 will do it for ya before install or you need to run disk part...

Go download this tool to check
it will look like this if the alignment is good...

[95Viper]

Here is a good SSD guide:
SSD ABC Guide

Here is W1zzards alignment calculator:
SSD Alignment Calculator
Don't forget the RAID button, if and, when you check.

[Thrackan]

Also, did you do a fresh Windows 7 install or a clone? A cloned install can severely impact performance as Win7 sets alot of parameters during install depending on what it's being installed on.

[pabloottawa]

Nope..... It was a fresh install of win 7

[AsRock]

Intel recommend 16kb strip size for raid 0 going by there newer RST 10.1.0.1008 drivers.

Try turning off some windows services too like indexing, defrag and even pagefile.

[Thrackan]

Originally Posted by AsRock

Intel recommend 16kb strip size for raid 0 going by there newer RST 10.1.0.1008 drivers.

Try turning off some windows services too like indexing, defrag and even pagefile.

indexing, prefetch, superfetch are the first things you should kill

[AsRock]

Originally Posted by Thrackan

indexing, prefetch, superfetch are the first things you should kill

Yes those 2 as well..

[happita]

I don't mean to intrude, but why turn off:
superfetching
prefetching
indexing
page file
?
What does this accomplish?

[Thrackan]

Originally Posted by happita

I don't mean to intrude, but why turn off:
superfetching
prefetching
indexing
page file
?
What does this accomplish?

Superfetch, prefetch and indexing are useless on an SSD because accesstimes are so fast. It would be a waste of resources to actually index.

Pagefile on an SSD causes unnecessary wear and tear. (same also counts for the options above) I put my pagefile on my HDD, just in case I actually need it.

[TheLaughingMan]

Originally Posted by AsRock

Intel recommend 16kb strip size for raid 0 going by there newer RST 10.1.0.1008 drivers.

Try turning off some windows services too like indexing, defrag and even pagefile.

Originally Posted by Thrackan

indexing, prefetch, superfetch are the first things you should kill

I thought Win7 automatically turned these off when it detects an SSD during a fresh install? Well defrag I am sure it turns off, but not the rest which is why I ask.

[Thrackan]

Originally Posted by TheLaughingMan

I thought Win7 automatically turned these off when it detects an SSD during a fresh install? Well defrag I am sure it turns off, but not the rest which is why I ask.

not 100% sure, I believe indexing at least is auto turned-off, but I think I turned off pre- and superfetch myself.

[pabloottawa]

Originally Posted by TheLaughingMan

I thought Win7 automatically turned these off when it detects an SSD during a fresh install? Well defrag I am sure it turns off, but not the rest which is why I ask.

windows 7 came out before SSD drives became common so I don;t think it would turn anything off automatically for an SSD. Don;t forget when you install Windows 7 most likely you are installing an old version that has to update itself. Maybe it will turn some stuff off once it has updated to SP1 and the latest drivers but I have not seen any evidence of that.
I had to turn all that stuff off myself.

[fullinfusion]

your all slow lol.lolololoollllll... pmme for super fast ssd's...

alll ssd's are fast, but unless there aligned @ 1024k they don't work worth a shit!!!!

[fullinfusion]

anybody wanna buy an 6950 that is able to unlock to full 6970 clock....

I paid 240 ish for the duel bios gpu....

200 is what im asking!!!!! Ref card!!!!

will run 1000mhz core clock and 1300 mhz mem with ease.... 6970 fix!!!
keep it bro!!!! are you a tard?

that 6950 will do what you want it too.... dont give up so soon man!

[AsRock]

Originally Posted by TheLaughingMan

I thought Win7 automatically turned these off when it detects an SSD during a fresh install? Well defrag I am sure it turns off, but not the rest which is why I ask.

Could not tell you as i don't use raid with win7. How ever you can make a raid 0 before you install the OS to it. And as i know of the array would have to be rebuilt to change it and least Vista don't do that.

[95Viper]

Originally Posted by pabloottawa

windows 7 came out before SSD drives became common so I don;t think it would turn anything off automatically for an SSD. Don;t forget when you install Windows 7 most likely you are installing an old version that has to update itself. Maybe it will turn some stuff off once it has updated to SP1 and the latest drivers but I have not seen any evidence of that.
I had to turn all that stuff off myself.

For a little info on this by Steven Sinofsky (President, Windows and Windows Live Division)... read:

Windows 7 Optimizations and Default Behavior Summary posted 5 May 2009 3:00 AM (before SP1)

Quoted from the above page:

"As noted above, all of today’s SSDs have considerable work to do when presented with disk writes and disk flushes. Windows 7 tends to perform well on today’s SSDs, in part, because we made many engineering changes to reduce the frequency of writes and flushes. This benefits traditional HDDs as well, but is particularly helpful on today’s SSDs.

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn’t helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces. The FAQ section below has some additional details.

Be default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system’s partitions are created with the SSD’s alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment."

Be sure to read the Frequently Asked Questions at the bottom of the linked page, too.


Edit:

As, you can see from this WINHec presentation from 2008 they were working with vendors and such on the SSD features pre-beta.

[Thrackan]

It just dawned on me: maybe Windows 7 is not recognizing your RAID as being an SSD... I remember that there used to be (and maybe still are) problems with that.

EDIT: hmm, as far as I can remember that was only an issue with TRIM. But maybe you can test an individual drive to find out

[95Viper]

Originally Posted by Thrackan

It just dawned on me: maybe Windows 7 is not recognizing your RAID as being an SSD... I remember that there used to be (and maybe still are) problems with that.

Possibly could be true, if, the supporting hardware/software does not pass the identifiers or the firmware has the incorrect identifier.

Pic of the identifier powerpoint presentation page:



Just some FYI... There is a new firmware update for the series: SSD Firmware Updates and Tools for OCZ Vertex 2, Vertex LE, Agility 2 - Version 1.33

[pabloottawa]

Originally Posted by fullinfusion

did you partition the drives so they are aligned to 1024k?

Hi fullinfusion,

with regards to alignment the default during testing was 1024 but when I set them up in raid0 the default was 3xxx. I don't remember the exact number but it was more than double the 1024 that I got during individual testing. Is this ok? Bear in mind that both drives were individually wiped clean using the ocz tool and then set up in raid before installing windows. Now windows takes around 20 seconds to load from the MBR boot screen. Testing the drives with the os on them showed slower numbers but I'm assuming that's normal when the drives are being tested while running the OS at the same time. So does all this sound like these drives are on par or do they still seem slow?

P.S. I haven't installed silent hunter 5 yet but will do so after some further testing.