Gigabyte EX58-UD5 SSD Raid 0 problems

[Foxhound_VI]

Hej All..

Figured id give it a try in here to see if anyone might know what im doing wrong..

My problem is i can't seem to get my two SSD OCZ Vertex 60GB to run in RAID 0 when i align my disc.

I set the disc up in Raid menu to RAID 0, with a stripe size of 128.
then booted Vista recovery disc to diskpart the drive, vent repair windows, command, an typed diskpart.. list disk.. select disk 0, create primary partition align=128 size=20000(want to create 2 partitions so thats why only selected 20gb)
after partition was created, i typed active, then list partition to confirm align = 128..

I then rebooted an loaded Windows XP CD.. Pressed F6 during install an added the Raid Drivers for the board. i then select the partition i created with diskpart, to keep my alignment, an select Format NTFS (or Quick Format NTFS have tried both)
it formats, an copies the files from the windows cd to the disc.. then it reboots, but after this it freezes at this post

Controller BUS#00, Device#1F, Function#02: 06 Ports, 02 Devices
Port-00: Hard Disk, OCZ-Vertex v1.10
(Drive is controlled by the RAID BIOS)..

curser is just blinking beneath it..where it instead should show Port-01 an so on..

my Bios is F6, an my SSD har firmware updated to latest version..

The thing is though, if i choose to let Windows Xp create the partition during the install it doesn't freeze.(but then my ssd wouldn't be aligned properly) so seems to be when i align my disc's

Has anyone experienced similar problems ?
what can i be doing wrong ?

on a site note, i can align my disc an run them in single mode as im doing right now without problems as well.

Thanks alot..

[PippinPixie]

Re: Gigabyte EX58-UD5 SSD Raid 0 problems

Hi,

Not to sure if you need to worry about aligning the disk with it beeing an SSD.

I was under the impression that align is used to align with physical (rotational) disks.

"With a physical disk that maintains 64 sectors per track, Windows always creates the partition starting at the sixty-forth sector, therefore misaligning it with the underlying physical disk. To be certain of disk alignment, use Diskpart.exe, a disk partition tool. Diskpart.exe is a utility provided by Microsoft in the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Support Tools that can explicitly set the starting offset in the master boot record (MBR). By setting the starting offset, you can track alignment and improve disk performance. Exchange Server 2003 writes data in multiples of 4 KB I/O operations (4 KB for the databases and up to 32 KB for streaming files). Therefore, make sure that the starting offset is a multiple of 4 KB. Failure to do so may cause a single I/O operation spanning two tracks, causing performance degradation." - Source

Now with it being an SSD is the tracks issue relevant?

To be honest I don't know for sure myslef (no experince with SSD as still out of my budget) but would be interested to know what others think.

[Foxhound_VI]

Re: Gigabyte EX58-UD5 SSD Raid 0 problems

yea Solid State disc needs to be aligned.. has something to do with how it writes / erase / rewrites in blockes.. SSD has limited life when it comes to write an erase, so to limit the write/erase you align the disc to a hole number to make sure it doesn't erase unnessesary..

can be 32/64/128/256/512/1024/2048 an so on..