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RAID-0 with 1 SSD and 2 HDDs -- help!

airatin
Level 8
Hi all,

I have a G750JW-RB71-CB which comes with 2x1TB HDDs and 16GB RAM. I recently installed a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD into Port 0 and moved the HDD that was there into the CD/DVD drive (ODD). I use Linux the vast majority of the time (Windows only when I'm absolutely forced to!) so I set up Linux on the SSD and I have Windows on one of the HDDs. (and also right now Linux also on the other HDD but as soon as my SDD is set up I'm deleting that and using it for storage).

I keep hearing about RAID-0 and what wonders it can do for improving performance and etc. This thread in particular talks about setting up RAID-0 for Linux and Windows.

I notice, however, that everyone talking about RAID-0 says that you need to have 2 identical drives (in terms of size, at least), so I wouldn't be able to do RAID on the SSD, is this correct? If I can't RAID for Linux, would I at least be able to RAID-0 the 2x1TB HDDs I have for Windows? How would I do this without negatively impacting the SSD?

FInally, do you have any suggestions on how to improve performance on Linux SSD? I have 16GB RAM so should I set up a RAM Disk for it? I'm also going to enable TRIM on it, so I know that.

I'm just sad at how the thread I linked before has read/write speeds at 1.1 GB/s! How can I get that on my Linux?? That would be amazing and I wish it could be done! Best performance possible is what I'm after, 100%.

Thanks!
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2 REPLIES 2

airatin
Level 8
Anyone? 😞

Quad5Ny
Level 7
I'm sure someone else will go into depth on why you should not RAID 2 disks together whom have vastly different performance... but your short answer is Do NOT put the SSD & HDD in a RAID0 array.

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Edit: As for putting the 2 1TB drives into a RAID0 array, you would have to switch the SATA mode to RAID in the UEFI and then create a new array with a 64KB Stripe size (the Stripe for SSD's should be 16KB). Note that after doing this you will loose all the data on the drives, so have backups! - Sorry for not being more detailed about the UEFI RAID setup, I don't know what the layout looks like.

Now that the controller is in RAID mode, both your OS's will need to have a RAID driver. You can tell if they support Intel RAID (by default) by if they boot or not. If they don't boot you will need to install the driver during the OS setup or add the driver or some other way. - Windows 8 supports Intel RAID OOTB (out of the box) but I'm not sure what your Linux Distro has.