How to enable TRIM for SSDs in RAID-0 on Intel 6-series (P67, Z68) chipsets

Few months back Intel announced that they were finally bringing TRIM support for SSDs in RAID setups (specifically RAID-0). But that support came with one limitation. Only the 7-series boards were supported. That means Z77, H77 and so on. People with old P67, Z68 boards were left behind. 

Technically, there was no reason why 6-series boards could not support it, but they had the old RAID ROM (firmware) which were not supported. Of course the manufacturers could release BIOS (UEFI) updates with the new RAID ROM, but we all know that would never happen. They want to sell their new boards. Why support the last generation? 

Even though the RAID ROM is bundled with the BIOS (UEFI) files, it is a separate thing. You can hack the BIOS file and modify the RAID ROM potion of it with the new ROM.

Some guy at Overclock.net forums has posted such modified BIOS files for Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI and Asus boards (click on the link to access them).  If you are using SSDs in RAID-0, give it a shot. If your particular board is not listed, you can upload the BIOS file and ask him to modify it. 

Here's the link to the forum thread. LINK

You of course will have to install the correct Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers to get it to work. Everything you need to know is posted in the first post of the above thread.

I don't really have a reason to update to the new RAID ROM because I have given up on RAID-0. But I would just update it for the hell of it - when I get back home. That's me. ;)

Samsung Spinpoint F3 7200RPM HD103SJ 1TB drives in RAID-0 Benchmarks

Recently I purchased a Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drive to replace my old RAID-0 volume. Yes, you read it right. I replaced a high performance storage solution with a single drive solution. I did it for couple of things.

1. More capacity. I had 2TB, now I have 3TB.

2. Safety of data. Two drives in RAID-0 doubles the chances of something going wrong. Well, that’s if you look purely at the hardware faults. You can even corrupt the RAID volume.

3. Less power consumption. Single drive is better than two drives.

Anyways, the old drives were top of the line couple of years ago and two of them RAID-0 still can do a wonderful job. Here’s some benchmarks of the empty RAID-0 volume.

CrystalDiskMark

HD Tune Pro 5

Compared to the Toshiba’s scores, these were scoring substantially higher. But weirdly, I am not really noticing the difference in performance.

BTW, if interested, here’s the single drive performance.

CrystalDiskMark

HD Tune Pro 5

Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) for a data drive – worth it?

Background

This all started when Seagate launched the new MomentusXT 750GB drives. I was wondering if getting two of them to replace my 2TB RAID-0 data drive (2x1TB Samsung F3s)  was worth it. After checking the current prices of the MomentusXT drive, I gave up the idea. Each drive cost 18,000 JPY which is outrageous (for just 750GB per drive). Anyways, the “idea of caching” didn’t leave my mind right there.

Instead of getting all new drives, I could buy the OCZ Synapse Cache drives to get the same effect. OCZ have specifically released an SSD for caching. The cache management is done by their proprietary software.  I could not find it online in Japan, but the Newegg prices are pretty steep as well. $150 for 64GB, which is about $2.4/GB. You can get 120GB SSDs almost for that price these days. For example, the OCZ Agility 3 120GB is ~$152 (JPY 11,980) these days.

Samsung F3 RAID-0 benchmarks

Finally I got the RAID volume up and running and the real world performance is very decent. Copying large files and extracting large archives is much much faster than before.

Here are some synthetic benchmarks.

I sent back the defective F3 yesterday. I hope it gets there.

The Vertex 2 isn’t lonely anymore

I was running out of space in the SSD. I had few games in the hard drive, and I was careful not to install big apps if I didn’t really need them. It was time to get a second SSD. Actually, it would be my third, because I already had one in the laptop.

There were few options. I could buy a second Vertex 2 50GB model and pair it with the one I already had, and make a RAID0 volume. It would give great performance and I would have one big 100GB partition to play with. The downside would be, I would lose TRIM functionality and SSDs are still expensive.

The other option would be to wait for the Vertex 3 or Intel’s new 510 series SSDs and get one of them, move the Vertex 2 to the lappy and sell the Kingston 40GB. Even though it seemed like the best option, it is not. First, selling a used SSD would be pretty hard work, because it would be considered as “degraded”. Second, Vertex 3 and Intel 510 would utilize SATA-3 interface and the one I have in the motherboard is a Marvel chip which doesn’t do a great job. So I might not get the fullest performance out of the new drive. Besides, the new drives won’t be any cheaper. They would still cost an arm and a leg. One more thing; two Vertex 2s RAIDed will perform as fast as a Vertex 3, and it seems Intel drives won’t be that fast anyways.

Note: Sandforce drives don’t need TRIM to bring back the lost performance. It has garbage collection stuff built into it. So RAIDing two Sandforce drives wouldn’t be a problem. (Read here and here)

So I decided to get a new Vertex 2 and RAID0 with the current drive. I missed an opportunity to get one for JPY9980, which was pretty cheap, and the next lowest price was 12900. Dang! I wouldn’t pay that much. Last Thursday I saw Amazon list one for 10900 (same thing was at 13600 or something before that), so after thinking, rethinking and more, I decided to hit the order button. It was supposed to come on Saturday, so it was fun. But it was delivered to me after 6pm. Stupid delivery morons!

It came with an old firmware version. I had the latest in the drive I had. So I plugged it in and upgraded the firmware to the latest. I managed to grab a ATTO score before I RAIDed the two drives.

This is the new drive

This is the old drive.

Old drive is a bit slow, but it could be due to degradation, or because OS is installed in it and stuff is going on in it, or both.

And THIS is the RAID0 performance. w00t!

So does it boot Windows faster? Nah! it is pretty much the same. Does it load apps faster? Slightly, but you would need a stopwatch to see the difference. So what did it give me? More storage! More SSD storage. Now I can install the games in the SSD. Oh and it loads games pretty fast. COD6 levels load pretty quickly. I am almost always the first to load the map.

P.S.

If you look at the performance of the 0.5k, 1k, 2k performance, it is more than twice as fast as a single drive. That is because I have enabled Write Back Caching, afaik.

The Windows Experience Index score for the hard drive is now maxed out at 7.9. One down, 4 to go. hehe