Can you stripe ssd drives

The read would only occur from a single drive in the rare case where a read quest begins at the exact start of the KB raid stripe.

So what happens when the default situation causes KB reads on each drive, on average, per seek? This is really poor performance, and a big focus on optimizing a RAID array here is to increase this figure. This is where the RAID stripe and readahead play a critical role.

First, lets take a look at the 1MB stripe size. So on average, this means, for each seek, KB of data is read from a drive. The next way we can increase performance is to increase the readahead on the array. In the image above, you can see what happens for a read request depending upon where within a stripe the read occurs. If the read is perfectly aligned to the start of a stripe, it will read from 2 drives in order to complete the request, but this is rare.

Which of these occurs depends how far into the stripe the read request begins, as depicted above. How does this impact performance? The total data read is KB, and, for a KB stripe, this requires 3 seeks you read from 3 different drives. So on average, a single seek results in KB of data read. Compared to the Pretty good! How does this KB read size perform for a 1MB stripe? Reading KB, you average KB per seek. Compared to the defaults of KB readahead and KB stripe size, this is a speed increase of 2.

A big caveat here is that these improvements only occur if the file you are reading is at least as big as the readahead setting. The readahead will only read to the end of the file you are accessing.

Nearly all requests will be for 10KB images, and, with a default readahead of KB these 10KB images will already be loaded in their entirety every time.

As well, a KB RAID stripe means that, almost always, the entire 10KB file will reside on a single disk, so the disadvantages of a small stripe size do not apply when reading files much smaller than the stripe size. Another catch is that there are diminishing returns on the readahead compared to the maximum stripe size.

What is the performance here? With seeks per second, even the KB stripe array can read The array with a 1MB stripe does even better — in nearly all cases, a 2MB read will require participation from 3 out of 4 drives. Workloads such as video editing or professional applications involving massive dataset analysis, on the other hand, will eat as much bandwidth as you have to offer.

Although SSDs have come down a lot in price over the last few years, they are still many times more expensive on a per-gigabyte basis than mechanical drives. This makes SSDs unattractive as redundant mass storage. Mechanical drives in purely-redundant or redundant and performance RAID configurations are still very relevant and cost effective for desktop users.

However for modern drives, write endurance is far beyond what most users will ever need. A complete loss of data even when an SSD cannot be written to, is very unlikely. In many ways RAID exists because mechanical drives are prone to failure in the first place. Nonetheless, we can provide some general guidelines:.

With a clear picture of where each approach works best, you should have a much better idea which option makes the most functional and economic sense for you.

At this time, you may want to assign a drive letter to your striped volume you can also do this at any other time. To do so, click Assign Drive Letter , and then enter an available drive letter. Alternatively, you can click Do not assign drive letter or path. You can also click Mount this volume on an empty folder that supports drive paths. However, this selection is beyond the scope of this article. Click Format this partition with the following settings , and then follow these steps:. In the Volume Label box, you can keep the default New Volume label or you can type you own label.

Or you can defer both of these tasks if you want. Click Next , check your selection in the Summary window, and then click Finish. The striped volumes are displayed on the two disks on your system. They have the same color code, the same drive letter if you mapped the drive during the procedure , and they're both the same size.

Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services. Privacy policy. Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. If you are making a small read, you will be playing Russian roulette as to which drive will contain the data odd stripes on SSD, even on HDD, or the modulus of the drive count, more accurately[without going overboard A large read will see an average of the seek times and read performances.

It would be somewhat schizophrenic Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 4 months ago. Active 6 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 6k times. Improve this question. Tyson Navarre Tyson Navarre 3 3 gold badges 9 9 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges.

Don't you lose GB on the GB disk, as well? Matt: what do you mean lose? If you're striping them together in to one volume, you combine the two physical disks into one big disk. If it were mirrored, you'd have one volume 64 gig and one volume , but mirroring isn't striped.