My first experience with 2xKingston V Series SSD RAID 0

[chanchan]

Hi,

I just wanted to make a post about my value SSD RAID 0 setup, which is my first experience with SSD's and I'm trying to get great performance without big bucks.

I live in Canada and I bought 2x64GB Kingston SSDNow V Series from Canada Computers for $119.99 CAD each, after taxes it came up to $271 and change. Which is actually cheaper than buying a single 128GB drive.

From all the reviews I've read, the main thing about these drives is the "limited" read performance of about 100 MB/s and write performance of 80 MB/s which is low compared to other mainstream/ethusiast targeted SSD's. However, compared to a Raptor/VelociRaptor this drive really gets interesting, considering the next-to-none access times.

I have them setup in a RAID 0 with a stripe size of 128kb running Windows 7 x64 Ultimate. As an operating system drive this setup has really impressed me, and so far my experience has been quite good.

The drives do not exhibit any stuttering issues that plagued the original JMicron controllers, and my system feels very snappy compared to my old WD Raptor which is now my applications/games hard drive.

I waited for quite a while to pull the trigger on SSD's, and so far I'm happy and have no regrets. I find that with SSD's configuring a RAID 0 setup is very logical, as you don't have the latency issue compared to mechanical hard drives, and the reduced chance of failure. Also, your wear of the memory cells is distributed between the multiple drives.

I will run more benchmarks with HD tune and post back with results soon. For those of you looking to do a great upgrade and make your computer feel and work like a bleeding edge machine, this SSD setup is really worth considering.

My setup:
Intel Q6600 @ 3.6GHz
Asus Maximus Formula Intel X38
4x2GB RAM
EVGA 8800 GTX ACS3 - (Sapphire HD5870 in for RMA)
Ultra X3 1000w PSU

2x64GB Kingston SSD V Series RAID 0 - OS drive
1x150GB WD Raptor - Large games/applications drive
2x250GB Seagate 7200.10 - Storage

Regards,
Chan

 

[Makaveli@BETA]

What are the write speeds like?

 

[chanchan]

What are the write speeds like?

I think the ATTO benchmark shows the write speeds, which is about 150 MB/s, so far using the system has been really a dream. Everything is very responsive and my aging Q6600 feels super quick!

Are there other free benchmark programs that I could use to get some more results?

 

[Flopper]

AS ssd becnhmark.
it seems to be a ok one regarding ssd.

but the user experience if it works, its what counts.

 

[Deluded]

Interesting. How fast do you get into windows from a cold boot?

 

[SicKlown42012]

Nice results. It's great to see another convert. Hopefully, the increased interest in SSDs will force the manufactures to push performance to another level, while dropping the price to something more palatable. If you start to notice a decrease in performance after using it for a while, Google "TonyTRIM", as it's supposed to help restore drives to near new levels. Just don't do it too often, as it will eat up write cycles. The same goes for benchmarking.

 

[chanchan]

AS ssd becnhmark.
it seems to be a ok one regarding ssd.

but the user experience if it works, its what counts.

Well I updated my post with the AS SSD benchmark scores, as you can see the 4k writes aren't really that great, better than a mechanical HD but not nearly as good as the "performance" SSD's.

Interesting. How fast do you get into windows from a cold boot?

Including all the SBIOS detection crap 44s into the Windows 7 desktop. It's times like this that I want to switch to an AMD platform, their BIOS detection and boot time is significantly faster. It actually takes about 20+ seconds to finish all the initialization and for Windows to actually start loading.

 

[Impulse]

I know the Intel-based 40GB Kingston drive is just as expensive as those 64GB (if not a lil' more so), but it'd probably be worth the performance boost (and reliability) for anyone that's not too concerned w/capacity... I only wish I had picked one up for $85 after MIR before they sold out on Newegg and the rebate died (now they're like $120-130). I'm itching to throw a cheap SSD into my netbook but I wanted at 'least 40GB for close to $120, $150 tops..

If prices don't drop much by March I'll probably opt for one of the 40GB Kingston drives or maybe a 30GB OCZ Agility if I can find it for closer to $100 after MIR. They have faster sequential writes and I'd probably be writing large files to it more than often I do to most other drives, even my 80GB X25-M desktop drive (movies rips before trips and photo/video backups during trips).