Two Kingston 40GB V Series Boot Drive SSDs in RAID 0
By
Test System
Before we look at the numbers, here is a brief glance at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. All benchmarks were completed on the
desktop with no other software programs running. The Intel Core i7 test
system was run in dual-channel memory mode at 2133MHz with 8-8-8-24
1T memory timings thanks to the Kingston HyperX 2133MHz C8 memory kit. The ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard was run with BIOS 0106 and set to run XMP profiles. This put the overall clock frequency of the processor at 3.75GHz!
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. All benchmarks were completed on the
desktop with no other software programs running. The Intel Core i7 test
system was run in dual-channel memory mode at 2133MHz with 8-8-8-24
1T memory timings thanks to the Kingston HyperX 2133MHz C8 memory kit. The ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard was run with BIOS 0106 and set to run XMP profiles. This put the overall clock frequency of the processor at 3.75GHz!
A Corsair P64 SSD was the ‘boot drive’ for the test system and run on the P55 Chipset (the blue header for SATA-II, 3.0 Gbps performance). A pair of Kingston 40GB Boot Drive SSDs were run on the Marvell Controller (the white headers for SATA-III, 6.0 Gbps performance).
We learned the hard way that the ASUS P7P55D-E Premium might feature the Marvell SATA 6Gbps, but you can’t make it bootable as the only options in the BIOS for the controller is AHCI or IDE. Since you can’t run hardware RAID and make drives on the controller bootable we opted to use software RAID 0 in Windows 7, which meant we had to use another SSD as the boot drive. We contacted ASUS about this and they said that an update for the boards controller and BIOS might make the SATA 6Gbps controller bootable with RAID in the future, but right now the update was in the beta stages and a little buggy. We passed at the other to try it out and tested the drives as secondaries.
| Intel LGA 1366 Test Platform | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Component |
Brand/Model |
Live Pricing |
|||
|
Processor |
Core i7 870 | ||||
|
Motherboard |
ASUS P7P55D-E Premium
|
||||
|
Memory |
4GB Kingston HyperX 2133
|
||||
|
Video Card |
ATI Radeon HD 5870 |
||||
|
Hard Drive |
Corsair P64 SSD |
||||
|
Cooling |
Thermalright MUX |
||||
|
Power Supply |
CoolerMaster UPC 1100W |
||||
|
Operating System |
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
||||
Let’s take a look at the benchmarks and see what a pair of these drives in RAID 0 can do!
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