RAID0(dbl SSD performance) or RAIDJBOD with SSD/HDD+SDcard

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jackluo923

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Only windows XP professional, windows Vista business and ultimate will work.
Windows server 2003, 2008 and windows 2000 server edition will work also, but I'm not going to discuss it here.

Goal: Combine the SSD and the SD card into single spanned (RAID JBOD) or striped (RAID 0 which sometimes double the performance compared to the SSD alone).

Instructions:
Read the links below on how to convert disks to dynamic disks.
Windows XP Professional Edition - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314343
Windows Vista Ultimate and Business - https://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windo ... e1033.mspx
Install a copy of compatible OS, format the SSD/HDD with NTFS partition.

First, you to turn your SD card from a removable storage to a non-removable storage.
I made a package which simplify this task. It can be downloaded from http://cid-2fedd1342ad58911.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Acer Aspire One/Acer Aspire One.exe
It's compressed using winrar SFX (self extracting) thus the file ends in .exe
Extract this package to your desktop (recommended) or any place you have easy access to. Open the file called "Instructions" and read it and follow it.

After you've done all of the above, start the dynamic disk wizard.
Turn the SSD and the SD card into dynamic volume and configure them into either striped (almost doubles the performance, A.K.A RAID 0) or spanned (A.K.A RAID JBOD-just bunch of drives).
Finish the wizard.

Restart your computer. After restart, you should see that the SSD/HDD and SD card will be combined into one. If you configured the SSD and SD card into a striped volume, you will notice a lot of performance improvement, especially with the slow SSD version.
 
This looks real interesting as well.

I just finally got mine set up with FBWF; it's absolutely amazing. The Aspire actually runs like a computer now rather than a commodore 64. The only problem is the non-writing (which is the whole point of it I guess) but there was a shut down script to write everything so we'll see how that works.

Would this allow normal reading and writing to the drive with decent speed? If it can combine FBWF speeds with the ability to not have to turn off FBWF when you need to install then this would definitely be the perfect solution + given you're adding an SD card means more space.

Anyone tried this yet? Or does the OP have any long term experience with it?
 
With a striped configuration, typically, you'll get around 80-90% efficency of the total throughput.
Meaning: the throughput of the striped array is the toal throughput times 0.8-0.9.
So in the acer aspire one's case:
SSD average read: 30MB/s~ write: 30MB/s
Fast SDHC card class 6 read: 30MB/s write: 25MB/s
If you put these two in striped array, you'll get approximately Read: 48-54MB/s Write: 44-50MB/s
That's comparible to the throughput of the 120GB hdd in AAO 150. But this combination will have superb access time of less than 1ms.

I believe by doing this, it'll be much faster than the FBWF method you did. It'll also allow full read and write permission so you'll be able to read and write normally in addition to 1.5 to double the speed of your FBWF method. You don't really have to worry about the wear and tear of the SSD and SD card. It'll be 5-10 years before it'll reach its limit. By that time, you should probably upgrade anyways. If you're still not convinced by the amount of time before the SSD will fail, simply enable the FBWF again with the the above method and you'll still get huge performance improvments not to mention extra storage space.

I have used this method of boosting performance since about 5 years ago. I have couple low capacity and slow HDDs. The motherboard was incapable of doing hardware RAID thus I went with this method.

The result was a 150GB~ array with 150MB/s throughput with about 20ms access time. It's pretty good for a bunch of old hdds.
 
everything i am reading online says that you cant have your system partition on a dynamic strip or span....

and what would happen if i stripped 2 sdhc card and then i took one out will windows was running?
 
Wow sounds like you know your stuff then ahah.

I'll have to try it out then. I did some research of how raid works n all that, I sorta understand it... I don't completely understand how it can 'add' their read/write speeds together to make it faster but whatever. A few questions though:

Will I need to buy an 8g SD Card so that its the same size as the SSD?

Is the process reversible, just in case I don't wanna do it anymore?

From what I gathered, you lose some space when you do this (or was that with RAID1 and 5?). If you do, what's the total storage space (assuming I buy another 8g, so 8 + 8)

Thanks for your help mate, this looks to be an excellent solution as if its as speedy as you claim, then it'll be fast, with full read and especially write ability
 
Im pretty sure it increases the speed because booth are mirrors of one another, so the pc can access half the data from each drive, therefore halving the total time of read/write, but because of the constraints of software having to do all this working out which half is where etc, it doesnt amount to exactly double speed.
correct me if im wrong anyone
Rory
 
i used my 2 sdhc class 6 16gb cards and set them up in a dynamic rad 0. it work ok, i didnt do any speed test on the raid, hd tune would only test the cards on their own. also on start up the drive failed ever time, most likely because the cardreaders dont start up to windows standards. i had to go into disk manager and manually start the drive after ever restart.
 
rory said:
Im pretty sure it increases the speed because booth are mirrors of one another, so the pc can access half the data from each drive, therefore halving the total time of read/write, but because of the constraints of software having to do all this working out which half is where etc, it doesnt amount to exactly double speed.
correct me if im wrong anyone
Rory
Click to expand...

You're wrong. The RAID mode you are describing is RAID1 ( which creates mirror of the drives.) The two RAID mode that I was talking about is RAID0 and RAID JBOD.
You're correct about this method won't double the SSD speed, but it's very close. The main reason of the "slow down" is the latencies generated from the software RAID. The actual throughput performance of dynamic RAID0 is about 80-90% of the toal throughput of the two drives/storage.

"also on start up the drive failed ever time, most likely because the cardreaders dont start up to windows standards. i had to go into disk manager and manually start the drive after ever restart."
Can you explain how to drive fails every time after startup? Did you convert them into non-removable storage?
 
well to start i am using the ewf mod, but that shouldnt have anything to do with it. i am running winxp on my ssd and raid my card readers. ever time i booted windows i could only see the my ssd partition and not my raid partition. under the disk management both card would read failed. i would right click on one of them and click restore or restart or something like that and they would come to life and work fine. i have done the card reader mod so that they read as hard drive other wise you can my a dynamic partition to them.


on another note, so can i set up stripping if i use vista on my boot partition or is it limited like xp?
 
Dynamic Stripping is available on Windows XP professional, Windows Vista ultimate and business.

"well to start i am using the ewf mod, but that shouldnt have anything to do with it. i am running winxp on my ssd and raid my card readers. ever time i booted windows i could only see the my ssd partition and not my raid partition. under the disk management both card would read failed. i would right click on one of them and click restore or restart or something like that and they would come to life and work fine. i have done the card reader mod so that they read as hard drive other wise you can my a dynamic partition to them."

I think the EWF mod might have something to do with it. Since EWF mod is read-only, it might have prevented some settings to be saved to the OS. Try turning off the EWF for and restart a few times and see if the RAID0 dymaic array still fails everytime you restart.
 
im definitely lookin to give this a go but before I invest the money into buyin a large SD card, can I test out the functionality of this with my existing 1gig sd card or is that too small? plus will I need to buy an 8 gig or will any size suffice? Also because I got FBWF running, I was definitely goin to buy more RAM due to the fact that RAM is the main 'helper' in the process. Would this run well with 512mb ram?
 
tomo88 said:
im definitely lookin to give this a go but before I invest the money into buyin a large SD card, can I test out the functionality of this with my existing 1gig sd card or is that too small? plus will I need to buy an 8 gig or will any size suffice? Also because I got FBWF running, I was definitely goin to buy more RAM due to the fact that RAM is the main 'helper' in the process. Would this run well with 512mb ram?
Click to expand...

Yes any size will work. You can even use a 128 or 256MB card if you want. If you 1gig SD card is below 60X speed, you probably won't notice dramatic boost in performance. The effectiveness of this method pretty much depends on the speed of the SD card.

Before you do anything though, please back up your data. I'm not responsible for anything if anything goes wrong.
 
lol no worries, no blame on you. So an SDHC card will probably be a good option then? Can the AA1's left (or right) card reader take SDHC? I haven't been able to find out, sometimes I see yes, sometimes I see no on these forums. anyone with a definitive answer? Cuz if I can then Ill invest in one of those to get the most out of it.
 
tomo88 said:
lol no worries, no blame on you. So an SDHC card will probably be a good option then? Can the AA1's left (or right) card reader take SDHC? I haven't been able to find out, sometimes I see yes, sometimes I see no on these forums. anyone with a definitive answer? Cuz if I can then Ill invest in one of those to get the most out of it.
Click to expand...

There's no major differencebetween SDHC and SD cards besides the capacity. The speed of these cards doesn't depend on their capacity.

eg. a cheap Class 6 SDHC card might be as much as 3 times slower than 133x high speed SD card.
 
Thanks for that jack,

I tried it with my 1g 60x SD card... but wouldn't let me as it said it was too small :(

I've realli had enough of this SSD, from what I've gathered, its as slow as 5mb/s write speed. I'm trying to exchange it for the a150 but I already cut out my barcode for the Acer $99 cashback here in AUS so I dunno if they'll take it back. If not, then I'll go buy an 8gig SD card and try this out. As long as things can actually run at a decent, not even fast but decent, speed with this method ill be happy
 
tomo88 said:
Thanks for that jack,

I tried it with my 1g 60x SD card... but wouldn't let me as it said it was too small :(

I've realli had enough of this SSD, from what I've gathered, its as slow as 5mb/s write speed. I'm trying to exchange it for the a150 but I already cut out my barcode for the Acer $99 cashback here in AUS so I dunno if they'll take it back. If not, then I'll go buy an 8gig SD card and try this out. As long as things can actually run at a decent, not even fast but decent, speed with this method ill be happy
Click to expand...

If this does not work for you some odd reason. You can always use the method below:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=1433
or
http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8
I have already done it a few times and i can confirm it works flawlessly.
 
After hours of tinkering I still can't get this to work. :(
Currently I have two dynamic disks of 7,51GB & 7,61GB respectively. Rightclicking any of them has the "new striped volume..." option grayed out. Not marking any of them and going to actions -> all tasks shows "new spanned volume" & "new striped volume" but neither of them makes any kind of response when clicked. the OS disk seem to be stuck as dynamic for life btw, as it not even possible to convert it to basic when reinstalling Vista? :(
 
Frojd said:
After hours of tinkering I still can't get this to work. :(
Currently I have two dynamic disks of 7,51GB & 7,61GB respectively. Rightclicking any of them has the "new striped volume..." option grayed out. Not marking any of them and going to actions -> all tasks shows "new spanned volume" & "new striped volume" but neither of them makes any kind of response when clicked. the OS disk seem to be stuck as dynamic for life btw, as it not even possible to convert it to basic when reinstalling Vista? :(
Click to expand...

Could you upload a screenshot? Your situation seems a bit weird because normally, if you can convert them to dynamic disk, you will be able to set them to striped or spanned volume. Does the SD card appear as a non-removable storage?

Apparently the MS site which explained what the dynamic disks are didn't explain that after you convert your disk to dynamic, you cannot change it back without formatting it.
 
I've reformated once and never saw any option to make it a basic disk again.
Here are some screenshots:
[attachment=0:3dwyk743]diskmgmt.jpg[/attachment:3dwyk743]
[attachment=1:3dwyk743]diskbrowser.jpg[/attachment:3dwyk743]
 
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