Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

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Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

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Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Today, we will be taking a look at the performance of two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs. Two of these drives can be bought today for $115 each, which at $230. You can put them into RAID 0 and have a nice little 80GB data array. This is also slightly less expensive than a Kingston SSDNow M Series SNM225-S2/80GB drive as they cost $245.

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This review is a diamond in the rough as we were learning and rolling with the punches trying to get a RAID 0 array setup on a motherboard that featured SATA III 6Gbps. Our first big shock came when we found that the Marvell 88SE9123 controller that is used on the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard was not able to run a bootable hardware RAID array. The only thing thing that you can do to enable RAID on this SATA 6Gbps controller with two drives is to setup a standard windows software RAID configuration. This was the first time we used the disk management utility in Windows 7 to setup a striped array on a pair of dynamic disks. As you can tell, this method wasn't the best to benchmark the drives since physical disk benchmarks were not able to run on the array. By doing this review though we did learn numerous things that we would not have known otherwise. In the end we were still able to get a look some performance numbers as four of the benchmarks we used turned in solid performance gains.
Article Title: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1139/10/
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gwolfman
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by gwolfman »

Did you try these on the intel controller as well? I can't image the marvell being any better. Can you run AS SSD or ATTO on the intel to compare?
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by Digital Puppy »

gwolfman wrote:Did you try these on the intel controller as well? I can't image the marvell being any better. Can you run AS SSD or ATTO on the intel to compare?
But the Intel controller is not SATA III (6 GB/s). Technically, the Marvel Controller should be twice the speed, right?
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by gwolfman »

Digital Puppy wrote:
gwolfman wrote:Did you try these on the intel controller as well? I can't image the marvell being any better. Can you run AS SSD or ATTO on the intel to compare?
But the Intel controller is not SATA III (6 GB/s). Technically, the Marvel Controller should be twice the speed, right?
Well, yes, if the SSD has a SATA III controller in it, which it doesn't. So it'll default to SATA II. I remember reading an article that showed the marvell controller being a bit slower than the intel one (maybe an old driver issue?). Maybe the difference isn't big enough. But if you raid them on the intel, you can boot from it. Just an idea.
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by shaxs »

Im still waiting for pricing to come down.... with video games taking up large amounts of space and I normally put them on my boot drive...
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by JMMD »

Interesting information. At that price I think SSD is finally affordable and I don't need more than 80GB for my gaming PC. I only have a few games installed at one time so this would work fine for me.
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by werty316 »

40GB is not enough space for my liking however adding a couple more and running them in RAID 0 would solve that problem and be sweet at the same time.
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by Snowwie »

I have two of these in a raid 0 array.

I didn't bought them together, the first one I had over 4 months, when I decided to buy a second one for a raid 0 array.
It would give me 80GB total and more speed, while the Kingstons are very cheap at the moment. I bought if for € 89,- (Netherlands).
Because there is no TRIM support I underpartitioned them by 10%.(This is always recommended for SSD's which do not have trim support).

So I did some benchmarking:

This one is from the 5th of April, with only ONE Kingston
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This one is from yesterday with both of them in raid 0.
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I cannot be sure, but I think I should have secure erased the first one, but I did only a full format. Speeds could be higher than this, although these speeds are very very fast, my system (windows xp pro) works like a charm. Trim support is out of the question. But, when you have a Ghost image of your c-drive it is possible to secure erase the whole drive now and then and put back the Ghost image.

Any thoughts?
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by Apoptosis »

Looks fairly close to what I got:

Image

Your drives do support TRIM if you wanted to hack the firmware like I did after that benchmark above - http://forums.legitreviews.com/about25561.html
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by kenc51 »

I also dont see the point in using the Marvel controller here, unless your previous tests for comparison was done this way too
The Intel SATA controller is quicker, allowing better IO performance and these drives don't come close to saturating SATA2.
Each drive has a seperate 300Mbit link to the board, they don't share the SATA2 link, so their aggregate bandwidth available is 6Gps even with SATA2.

Most people going for this kinda setup will be looking to install the OS and boot from it, so Intel chip set is the only way to go IMO

:edit:
Only just now read your conclusion
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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by Snowwie »

Apoptosis wrote:Looks fairly close to what I got:

Image

Your drives do support TRIM if you wanted to hack the firmware like I did after that benchmark above - http://forums.legitreviews.com/about25561.html
But they don't support trim when in raid??

I did an erase of both SSd's last night, this did the trick. Although it was kinda lot of work, I did the following things:

- Taking down the raid array in the raid tool (CTRL+i)
- Set "Raid" -> "IDE" and "Enhanced" -> "Compatible" in the bios. (otherwise hdderase can't see the SSDs).
- Create a boot floppy containing the program "hdderase".
- Boot with this disk and use the program for erasing both ssd's.
- Using the raid tool to assemble back the raid array (leaving 15% unused).
- Using the Windows XP setup disc to format the new array (raid drivers required via F6 while starting)
- Aborting the "Windows install"
- Reset changes I did in the bios earlier
- Starting the Norton Recovery Disc, load the Raid drivers manually
- Recover my Windows installation.

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Re: Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0

Post by Apoptosis »

looks like you got a boost in performance though.
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