EX58-UD3R with SSD

[pegerob]

Hi. EX58-UD3R here with i7 920 CPU & 6GB Corsair RAM. Two 1TB HDDs in RAID1. Windows 7 64-bit.
I'm considering adding SSD for faster boot.
Any experiences good or bad to share?
TIA
Peter

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

Yes certainly! SSDs are good!

I have a couple of different SSDs. One is a standard Corsair Performance 256GB SATA2 SSD that is as you would think of a drive. This works very well and has all the benefits like silence, cool running etc. It is also very fast especially for booting up.

The second drive I have is a OCZ Revo2 x2 which doesn't even look like a drive as it is basically a PCIE card that runs 100GB of memory as a RAID0 and is extremely fast. It even makes the ordinary SSDs feel slow. There are even faster ones out now. These ar enot cheap drives but speed is their thing. They can go from pressing the power button to a usable Windows desktop in 20 seconds. If you can afford the price I would advise getting one. You won't be sorry.

[Tinker]

Just experimenting with EX58 at present, Intei i7 950. 12gb ram. Have small PCIe add on card 6gb/s
in 2nd Graphics slot, 5gb limit. With OCZ 3 maxiops best I can get in AHCI mode so far is 300gb/s read
425gb/s write. It's faster using Ramdisk, but not tested SSD yet, Win 7 x64 & waiting for a better PCIe
6gb/s card to test. SSD is 120gb, could be the newer SATA 3 SSD are faster even if used in SATA 2. ATTO
used for tests.


Regards tinker.

[pegerob]

Dark Mantis and Tinker - thanks for your responses and welcome to the forum.

Dark Mantis - not being h/w expert, I hadn't thought of PCIe options. However, looking at OCZ web site, I note that EX58-UD3R is not in their list of tested motherboards. Also that there is an interaction with the RAID Controller which is already in use to support my two HDDs. Apart from the cost, it does seem an attractive way, though. Any further comments? I haven't had time yet to see if there are other PCIe bootable drives around.

Tinker - are you using your PCIe cards for boot or just storage?

TIA

Peter

[Dark Mantis]

There are other PCIE storage card around but not many that will allow booting straight out of the box. If you are concerned with the compatibility with your RAID I am sure that it could be got around as I know Allan has the similar setup and he runs his alright.

[pegerob]

Thanks. Hoping Allan will notice this!

I am trying to understand the implications of the caveat on the OCZ site

note that due to limited option ROM space, it is often not possible to use the RevoDrive while the Onboard RAID Controller is enabled on many motherboards

I don't understand that as, if I'm following (and I said, I'm not an expert!), the RevoDrive has a RAID0 controller on the PCIe card so why does the motherboard controller get involved?

I note that the EX58-UD3R offers 6 x SATA 3Gb/s on South Bridge and and 2 x SATA 3Gb/s on GIGABYTE SATA2 chip. As both support RAID, does this mean two separate Onboard RAID Controllers?

TIA

Peter



-

[Aussie Allan]

   Hi pegerob

  DM ask me to have a chat with re what your trying to do.

  My hard experience is limited the the board and setup in my sig ....but because it's X58 they should be pretty similar

  Option Rom space is mostly applicable to the boot drive and what you're trying to drive off it....with later boards it will become less relevant with bigger Option Rom space with the UEFI platforms.....because they will just have more space......but we have what we have!

  The problems I had was ......I had and installed the RevoDrive x2 ..... no real problems there .....well a few but got around them.

  The real problems kicked in when I added a Highpoint Rocket Raid PCI-e card......these are configured out of the box to be bootable.....what I had attached is irrellevant here.......the result was I had too much being copied to the option Rom on boot.......luckily I could via the configurable flash utility on the 640 raid card.......turn off a few settings which made it then non bootable.....I still had the Raid ability but was now able to boot again.

  I'm afraid you'll be like I was and some experimentation is in order

 the RevoDrive has a RAID0 controller  on the PCIe card so why does the motherboard controller get involved?...Answer....

  The RevoDrives are actually 4 x 25GB units Raided under Raid0 .....there made to run under IDE or ACHI.....Via not one but 2 onboard Raid controllers (On the PCI-E Card).....

  Not certain as to what you read on the OCZ website but Besides my Revo x2 running in ACHI......I have the Raid card with 4 HDs in Raid0 and I have 2 other Drives running Raid0 again but this time on the ICH10R Raid controller AND 10GBs of system memory running with RAMDISK .....I will not lie and say this was "EASY".......Just that it can be done!.....

  Now things have moved on as it does pretty quickly ATM.....you might want to look at what I'm planning for my next build for C: drive.

  120Gb OCZ Agility 3s can be had for about £120 at the moment......Lets say you got your mitts on 4 of these......they actually Raid pretty well.

  So that will give you 480GBs space for C; drive.......for about 2000MB/s read and write speed......What!.....2TB read and write ......Yup!

  Even if you had two running sweet.....these would out perform the RevoDrive x2 but not the X3........but 3 will.....worth a thought is it not!

  Worse case scenario is you might have to add a 6Gb/s raid card to hold them.....but if I was you ....I'd be trying the Intel controller first .

  Feel free to ask any questions I missed out on.

  Aussie Allan

[Tinker]

Dark Mantis and Tinker - thanks for your responses and welcome to the forum.

Tinker - are you using your PCIe cards for boot or just storage?

TIA

Peter

Just using as single bootable drive from PCIe Peter. Started with Manhatten card & find Scan do another make that is same board at half
the price. If you want raid from SATA 3 card you need dual chip. Hopefully my new card will arrive tomorrow, it's an LSI 9211-4i to test.
This I'm told will run single drive but is a Raid card. I use removable drives, SATA & SSD + IDE & Floppy & is a mulifunction PC.


Regards tinker.

[pegerob]

Hi to Dark Mantis, Tinker and Aussie Allan

My apologies to you all for not responding more quickly to the helpful advice and experiences you have given on my original request for help. Other pressures intruded here and I have only just found the time to say 'thank you'. I am most grateful for what you have all shared.

In part, it means that my confusion is now on a higher plane but I have come to some conclusions (I think!)

1) I like the idea of the PCIe approach but I'm nervous because it's not explicitly supported by my motherboard and BIOS (which says hard drives and CDROM boot only). I want to use my PC rather than struggle to overcome challenges I can do without!

2) Therefore I feel I will have to go down the more conventional route of adding an SSD. Even this seems to require some careful thought as how best to move Windows to it without disturbing everything else. Still investigating that.

3) PCIe will probably have to await a mobo upgrade at some time in the future.

I'm sure you'll tell me if I'm missing an opportunity but, in the meantime, thanks again. The response from this forum has been great.

Regards

Peter

[Dark Mantis]

Well good luck in whatever way you decide to go finally. At least you have more information now to pick from and if yopu require any more help you know now where to find us.

Let us know how you get on please.

DM

[Tinker]

Although I am now running an LSI 6gb/s PCIe card this was a bit complicated & Fimware + SSD had to be updated. 450gb/s write & 550gb/s
read were achieved but affected boot up time. I would go for SATA 3 SSD to future proof, Scan do a cheap (around £20.00) PCIe card that has
little affect on boot time plug n play & don't bother with driver. This will give you some increase in speed by using 1 port only for boot SSD,
2nd port is fastest. Use the SATA 2 ports for other HDDs. The Highpoint has a lot longer boot up time.

I set to AHCI (Gbyte) at bottom of page but the main AHCI (top of page) is appalling on boot time so switched back to IDE.

I originally purchased Manhatten PCIe card, the cheap one from Scan is identical card under a different name, half the price !!

Use something like Acronis True Image to clone your HDD, I prefer earlier versions as less intrusive.


Regards tinker.