Your experience after having done a clean reinstall of Win7 certifies what I previously have written: Nothing will be changed.
Here is my comment:
1. Your RAID0 benchmark results are not as poor as you think. I didn't see any similar read speeds with a non-RAID SSD system.
2. Wait for the upcoming bug-free Intel SSD firmware, flash it into your SSD and redo a benchmark.
3. As long as we don't get an Intel RAID driver, which is able to give the TRIM command to the SSD, our SSD RAID systems will not be perfect.
Notice:
This is the way I have partitioned my 2x160 GB RAID:
Drive0: Boot partition (size: 8 GB, containing the MBR and the pagefile)
Drive1: Win7 x64 partition (size: 70 GB, no pagefile)
Drive2: another OS partition (size: 70 GB, no pagefile)
Drive3: Data partition (size: 150 GB)
Here is what HD tune looks like when I set HD tune block size to 512kb(compared to the 64kb default). Why is there such a huge variation in read performance with these settings?
I *think* with a strip size of 128KB that it reads/writes 128KB for the 64KB block size test. Another factor may also be the page and block sizes of the SSD. Hopefully somebody with more expertise can confirm this??
I also have RAID0 running on 2 160GB g2 drives under windows 7. My read transfers are:
64KB block = 172 MB/sec
128KB block = 225 MB/sec
512KB block = 418 MB/sec
1MB block = 450 MB/sec
As for driver I am using c:\Windows\system32\DRIVERS\iaStorV.sys version 8.6.2.1012 (comes with OS)
7.9 for disk transfer under Windows Experience is nice but franky I am scared to make any changes since it's rather uncertain re X25M firmware and support for SSDs in RAID under Storage Manager appears to be lacking.
All benchmark tests are synthetic and don't show the real performance while doing the usual work.
@jmd:
Your posted read transfer speeds are very interesting for me, because I have a rather similar hardware configuration (2x160 GB Intel X25-M G2 as RAID0 array running Windows 7 x64), but extremely different benchmark results.
With a RAID strip size of 128 KB I have read transfer rates of more than 500 MB/sec (see one of my previously posted benchmark results).
Additional informations:
1. Both SSD's have been successfully flashed with the new and currently withdrawn SSD firmware.
2. My Intel ICH10R SATA RAID Controllers are managed by the new RST drivers v9.5.0.1037.
3. The pagefile is a fixed one (size: 8 GB) and outside the OS partition.
I installed Matrix Storage Manager driver 8.9.0.123 and still get ~400MB/sec read transfers using a 512KB block size.
FYI my stripe size is 128KB and a PM55 chipset with ICH8M-E/ICH9M-E.
