white noise

Once the two SSDs were installed and recognized by Windows in RAID 0, it was time to move my boot partition from its 80GB 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda to the new RAID volume. First I used a Ghost boot disk to image the partition to a different drive. Then I used Ghost to take that image file and set up a new partition on the SSD volume. That second step of deploying the image took only about 10 and a half minutes to copy almost 31GB from the compressed image file. Not bad at all. Then with a quick trip back to the BIOS, I reordered the RAID to be the first boot drive. Then back in windows I just shuffled a couple drive letters around (moved the original c partition to the last letter – later I will clear this and merge it with another partition on the same disk). To wrap the setup, there were a handful of windows tweaks to streamline the use of the SSDs. All in all, super simple.

The difference was noticeable from these first couple reboots. While not the nearly-instant boot some youTube videos show, it was a marked improvement. Before and after the upgrade I timed the duration from power-on to the login screen and then from hitting enter on the login screen to a fully loaded desktop (and I have a LOT of services and tray apps that start). The pre-login time was improved, but so much of that is spent in POST steps the RAID only really kicks in when it gets to loading windows. On the other hand, the speed increase after logging in was awesome. The desktop comes up instantly and the tray apps (most of which are loaded on C), services, network connection (and login in to many services like steam, live, twitter, etc), are all ready in just a few seconds. The performance of other apps (on other drives) and games isn’t affected much, of course, but the OS overall feels snappier (even better than a brand new and optimized windows install). I’m looking forward to my upcoming Win7 upgrade to compare even further.

I ran several other benchmarks before and after. Some benchmarks are designed for spindle disks and others specifically for SSDs, and just a couple are decent at both, so I used:

• ATTO and Everest Disk Benchmarks for both
• HDtune, specifically for the Seagate HDD
• AS SSD Benchmark, specifically for the RAID

I also included a test of my 300GB VelociRaptor now and then just to add some sense of scale. All of the data shown below is average and sustained to be conservative (for short bursts the metrics may far exceed this – for example, Everest reported reads as fast 482 MB/s).

Every year I’m compelled to make at least one or two upgrades to my computer(s) — whether I need them or not. Related to my main rig (“big red”), the upgrades always occur before the summer MillionManLan so I can take full advantage of them during the 4 day game fest.

This year’s plan is to upgrade to Windows 7 (from Vista). But I couldn’t stop there. Solid State hard drives have been dropping in price and improving in performance and reliability over the past couple years. All the manufacturers are a couple generations into it, and new additions like wear leveling, TRIM and aggressive garbage collection have made SSDs a viable option for everyday use. Once I saw the 30GB OCZ Vertex drop to $80 on newegg I knew this was an upgrade that had to be done before upgrading to Win7.

It was only after I received the Vertex in the mail that I realized my C partition was occupying 35GB. I was able to trim it back a little, but with hardly any apps on that drive, the bloated 64bit OS was mostly to blame. It became clear that shrinking my boot partition to a size that would still leave a comfortable amount of worry-free room on a 30GB SSD just wasn’t going to happen. I decided with two SSDs in RAID 0 I would have plenty of space (~60GB), PLUS I’d seriously increase performance even further. After plenty of research on the pros and cons, it was decided and I bought another. Sure, I could have send the 30GB drive back and opted for a bigger disk, but the two smaller drives were actually no more expensive.

These guys are small! Here’s a comparison of both next to an old iPod.

The first step was physically installing the drives, which is easy because they are tiny. I was able to plug them into any remaining SATA ports on my motherboard (since the BIOS would allow for reordering later on). Since I was on Vista, all the necessary software to define the RAID volume on the ICH10R controller was already loaded. I just had to switch the IDE mode in the BIOS to “RAID” and then define the new RAID 0 volume from the two disks in the Intel Matrix Storage tool. So far so good…until I tried booting to Windows. BSOD. Every time. Setting the IDE mode in the BIOS mode back to AHCI fixed the problem, so there was clearly some RAID-related driver issue. But Vista is supposed to have that loaded by default, right? Heck, I could even see it in the system32 directory. I tried reinstalling the latest RAID driver for the ICH10R, switched back to RAID – same thing. I spent a full night reading different threads about people with similar problems. Turns out, even though Vista (and Win7) install the RAID driver, it’s actually disabled if you don’t use it from the start, and takes a Registry modification to enable. You’d think that changing the BIOS IDE mode would flip the driver in use, but it doesn’t. After a quick regedit, I was in business. Windows was booting in RAID mode (although at this point my ssd volume was still empty). In the next update I move the boot partition over and generate some fancy graphs.