Solid-state drives are hot commodities for enthusiasts looking to squeeze every bit of performance from their systems. While even a single, midrange solid-state drive is a huge upgrade over a standard hard drive, RAID-ing two (or more) SSDs can result in truly extreme performance. A pair of modern SSDs running in RAID 0, for example, can silently offer upward of 1GB/s of read bandwidth, with similar writes and nearly nonexistent access latency. That's something no array of hard drives could ever muster.
Configuring a group of solid-state drives in RAID is no different than doing the same with standard hard drives. We used an Intel X79 Express-based motherboard from Asus for this endeavor, but the process is similar for a wide range of boards and chipsets.
With the SSDs connected to the RAID- capable ports on your motherboard lor RAID controller card], power up the system and enter its BIOS or UEFI. Then
head into the advanced configuration or integrated peripherals menu and find the SATA configuration option. Once there, set the SATA ports for RAID mode, then save the changes and exit the BIOS / UEFI.
On the next boot, you should see a prompt at some point after the POST in which you can enter the RAID configuration menu / option ROM Ion our Intel- based system, we had to press Ctrl+I], Enter the option ROM and you'll see a handful of menu items. First you'll have to select the drives to include in the array and create the volume. Once created, you'll then have to give the volume a name and choose the RAID mode—we chose RAID 0 for its high-performance characteristics. Then you'll have to choose a stripe size [Intel recommends 128K for RAID 0) and finally set the total capacity of the RAID volume. Save the settings, exit the option ROM, and that's it.
Keep in mind that you'll also need to install the correct drivers for your OS to
Configuring RAID on an Intel-based motherboard requires tittle more than entering the option ROM and working through some simple menus. AMD, Marvell, and other RAID controllers can be configured in a similar fashion, as well.
properly detect the array. And that Trim— an important feature of SSDs that helps maintain long-term performance—is not supported in RAID, but the idle garbage- collection algorithms available in newer SSDs will still work.
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