I have a 3+ year old i7 rig (using an old ASUS P6T Deluxe) which currently has two SSD's in RAID 0 using the on-board Intel Matrix Storage RAID Controller (The predecessor to Intel RST?) - The SSD's are 1st generation Samsung RBX drives and cost £1200 3+ years ago.
The Raid 0 SSD array is dog slow by modern standards:
Now then, i have purchased 2 Intel 520's & will be installing these soon, when i do, i am trying to decide if it's even worth putting them back in RAID 0.
Things to consider (that i can think off, feel free to add more):
- Trim wont work through a RAID 0 array (Is this assumption correct? will Trim work at all through such an old controller - even if i dont use RAID?)
- My board only has SATA 2 (3GB/s) slots - so i already have a bottleneck there - RAID 0 would help get around this a little as IO would be split over 2 lanes? (Again, is this assumption correct?)
So yes, to conclude, should i put the 520s in a RAID 0 array and loose TRIM, or keep them as separate drives and hopefully gain TRIM functionality?
UPDATE:
Based on sblairs info regarding the sandforce native GC i decided to go with raid 0 and ignore trim, I've re installed the os, apps & drivers & re-ran the benchmark:
As you can see, the difference is huge & it's blatantly obvious when using the rig - well worth the upgrade - even with such an old board - quite surprised actually.