680M & Samsung 840 Pro in RAID 0

[Thumper_23 143]

Hi guys, has anyone heard of having issues with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in RAID 0 in the M18x r2 especially if you have the 680M SLI? Thanks

[svl7 5647]

I don't see how the GPU can have any influence on the RAID setup...

But I wish I had a 840 pro raid 'Only' running one in my desktop and it's already incredibly fast.

[Guest Tomas Puzis]

You should be more specific, what kind of issues? I'm running this setup and everything is fine and dandy.

[Allen George 10]

I can't see any way there could be a direct correlation here outside of a power draw problem, which unless you have a massive OC and OV on your CPU and GPUs, is pretty much out of the question.

[vs3074 10]

I was told dell doesn't offer Samsung 840pro raid and 680m sli due to incompatibility issues, not 100% where they arise from. It has to be something related to firmware dell puts on the ssd's.

[Hybrys 10]

There have been a few issues reported with this setup, but some people have gotten it to work.. My recommendation would be to buy a pair locally, test them out, and return them if they're odd. Apparently it was only a few firmwares that had the issue, including the one the Dell 840 Pros are locked to.

[scaesar 10]

I heard having SSD's in a raid 0 configuration doesn't give you that much of a performance upgrade.

[littleone562 39]

Try disabling agressive LPM in unlocked bios, and also enabling hotplugging. These disable power savings feature of the ssds.

[ArtemD 10]

The issue with SSDs in raid comes down to actually maxing out the SATA speeds. Since most newer laptops including M18x's support SATA 3 which has a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 6Gb/s = 750MB/s, and RAID 0 promises up two 2x the performance of a single drive(if 2 drives are used), there is definitely a potential for 2 speedy drives(500 MB/s+ read/write) speeds, to actually saturate the connection and hit a ceiling. Now of course this is all theoretical. Real world mileage may vary and your results will probably be a bit different.

[Yeti575 10]

Unless mistaken this is a performance thing only (?). RAID-0 trades reliability for speed. i.e. throughput speed is roughly doubled and fault tolerance is halved. If either drive in a RAID-0 array fails you loose ALL the data. RAID-0 is great for temporary storage of scratch data and also for the OS (assuming it's well backed up) but beyond that I would not use striped volumes for long term data storage.