SSD RAID0 Speed Bottleneck.

[Linksys120n]

I saw amazon selling Silicon Power 128GB SATA SSD drives for like 19* bucks each as well as a RAID0 compatible PCIE SATA 8x Expander card for  45* dollars... So my whole cart after getting everything including some extra RAM was ~300 USD.

EACH card says SEQ/SUS read/write of UP-TO 420MB/s (haha 420)

this is what I get SEQ SUSTATAINED testing with a real file. (file, a large zip of mixed misc. music related files, about 20 GigaBytes in size)

 

I can post a picture of the hardware in my case for proof but have done ZERO cable managing. my case looks like a medusa head.

as you can see the hump there in the graph shot up to 1 or 2 GigaBytes/second then shot down to only ~350MegaBytes/second.

I used the RAID compatible 8x expansion card to plug the matching SSDs in to.... BUT I used windows disk management tool for the raid0 (right click on the windows icon, on the task bar, it's the one right there in that menu)

Now everyone talks about "Storage Spaces" but I am super confused I think storage spaces is just a layer that sits on top of the settings found in the disk manager.... Right? it's just a new way of doing it? I'm a very confused 30 year old "boomer at heart" "millennial" here... help? would storage spaces work here?

what even would working be here... maybe this is fast... I'm not sure what the frame of reference is.

also should I blame the expansion card? I think it may be the card being the bottleneck here... it's only 4x PCIE 3.0 (might be 1x even.... if it is, that has to be the bottleneck right???)

thanks.

 

EDIT!!!!! Oh god that title! I had put a placeholder, intending to change it, WAS NEVER MENT TO POST IT WITH THAT TITLE.... oof. that was a dumb mistake.

Edited October 10, 2020 by Linksys120n
dumb title.

[PineyCreek]

I use storage spaces for a simple mirror fairly effectively...not sure if striping's really worth it.  I used to use RAID0 back when I had 60GB SSDs, and then also on my VelociRaptor drives, not sure I'd call it worth it now unless you require a logical block that's bigger than a single drive.

What model SSD exactly?  You can say a 128GB SSD from Silicon Power but there's multiple models.  Speed will be dependent on controller quality in the SSD, quality/rating of the chips inside, etc.

[PineyCreek]

If you're talking these, they do seem fairly well-rated: https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Performance-Internal-SU128GBSS3A55S25AC/dp/B07D7VTDNB/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2D3G3U4QF4SA4&dchild=1&keywords=silicon+power+128gb+ssd&qid=1602317640&sprefix=silicon+power+12%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-2

 

380 Mbits write is pretty nice all things considered.  Tried testing them separately with benchmarking software though? Maybe CrystalDiskMark?

[WereCatf]

35 minutes ago, Linksys120n said:

RAID0 compatible PCIE SATA 8x Expander card

Please, provide a link to the ones you bought. Many of those only operate at SATAII-speeds, not SATAIII, so that'd explain the bottleneck you are seeing.

[Linksys120n]

2 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

If you're talking these, they do seem fairly well-rated: https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Performance-Internal-SU128GBSS3A55S25AC/dp/B07D7VTDNB/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2D3G3U4QF4SA4&dchild=1&keywords=silicon+power+128gb+ssd&qid=1602317640&sprefix=silicon+power+12%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-2

 

380 Mbits write is pretty nice all things considered.  Tried testing them separately with benchmarking software though? Maybe CrystalDiskMark?

yup it's those exact ones! I bought 8 in one big batch.

 

 

7 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

not sure I'd call it worth it now unless you require a logical block that's bigger than a single drive.

this, this may end up being the solution. Just go with the option listed as 'Spanned' instead of striped.

I plan on using it as a Steam cache drive. so I went with Striped as it used to be the meta for this. But I wanted to test if it even had any benefit over 'spanned' and it may seem odd, but if you were able to ask if 'striped' was even worth it, in the first reply, with your corroboration to your own adventures with striped.

I think this is an easy fix. just used spanned, not striped.

[Linksys120n]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Please, provide a link to the ones you bought. Many of those only operate at SATAII-speeds, not SATAIII, so that'd explain the bottleneck you are seeing.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

my bad.

I'm used to other websites that are way the other way about links...

[Linksys120n]

Just now, Linksys120n said:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

my bad.

I'm used to other websites that are way the other way about links...

self quote not an edit as I fear I may hit post too late, I want to point out I DID swap out the SATA cables! I have a ton already from buying a massive bulk at a store closing sale a while back....

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Linksys120n said:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082D6XSZN/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Well, it looks like the SSDs you bought just simply cannot sustain high write-speeds for long. There's only a small SLC-cache on them and a piddly amount of RAM, so that's why the speed drops after a moment so much. For reads they should get much higher speeds in a RAID0, though, since for reads the cache doesn't matter.

[Linksys120n]

Just now, WereCatf said:

Well, it looks like the SSDs you bought just simply cannot sustain high write-speeds for long. There's only a small SLC-cache on them and a piddly amount of RAM, so that's why the speed drops after a moment so much. For reads they should get much higher speeds in a RAID0, though, since for reads the cache doesn't matter.

much higher?

so it would matter if the use is a steam game cache?

I'll switch back to 'striped' raid if you think it would help for that use.

the games are already on my pc on other drives btw, just need to drag and drop, don't want to do it until this is sorted though.

[WereCatf]

2 minutes ago, Linksys120n said:

much higher?

You'd probably get sequential read-speeds of 800MB/s or more, so yes.

3 minutes ago, Linksys120n said:

so it would matter if the use is a steam game cache?

Not really. The way games are currently designed, even a single SATA SSD is plenty and you won't get that much benefit from even faster storage, because the bottleneck will be on the CPU-side. In the future, games will likely be designed to take better advantage of SSDs, especially NVMe-drives with RTX IO and Microsoft's Direct Storage.

 

You will probably get a small bump from RAID0 over non-RAID, but don't expect any big difference. Just having an SSD of any kind, instead of a mechanical drive is the biggest boost.