E7240 RAID 0 - change screen

Hello.

I purchased a Dell E7240, I took the cover off and placed the mSATA SSD in the WWLAN slot and it benches at ever so slightly higher speed than the normal mSATA slot.

So... I figured buy another SanDisk X110 SD6SF1M 128GB, RAID 0 it and go for glory.
Has anyone tried it?
Can it be done?

These mSATA drives aren't cheap, so if I can't RAID 0 them I won't bother.

Other thoughts:
- I got the matt screen and it's totally ... is it possible to change the screen? I noticed eBay has some Lenovo x220 12.5" IPS.
- Right after first boot when it went to sleep it didn't come back. Doesn't recover from any type of sleep (have to pull the battery)... I'm going to put my own Win7 winreducer build on and hope there's no hw issue.

 

If your E7240's BIOS is the same as my E7440 (which is likely) then the RAID option supported by the BIOS is Intel Rapid Restore Technology which will do nothing to improve performance.

If your SSD is only 128GB then you will probably get a performance boost by moving to a higher capacity. Many of the data sheets show that the 128GB SSDs have lower write performance while a higher capacity lets you set aside some space for over-provisioning which reduces the risk of performance deterioration.

John

 

Darn, so now RAID 0 ... I love raiding SSD's (next best thing to PCIe).
Yeah, I'd get a 25% boost in write speed with a 256GB SSD, but RAIDED I'd get ~50% in both... with some Intel M25's SATA 2 I was getting 600Mbs write.
I unfortunately can't find any info on the RAID controller.

I think the Chipset is a HM86, also not that easy to find... which seems to indicate there's no RAID controller... but the BIOS has the RAID option on be default instead of AHCI.
It could be the QM87 like the E7440 which supposedly has RAID 0/1/5/10

 

the 7240 and 7440 both use the exact same chipset. raid is 0/1/5/10 built into the chipset. It hasn't really changed since the core duo days.

 

So does RAID 0 work with both mSATA slots filled? Does TRIM get passed through?

 

See this discussion in another forum.

Getting RAID 0 working won't be easy.

John

 

its actually easy



My steps were much simpler after reading all the replies and the posts on other forums

1) Partition USB stick to 1GB (just so there are no issues if you use a large drive)
2) format partition as FAT32
3) copy the bootx64.efi file onto the flash drive under EFI\Boot\
4) UEFI boot off the drive
5) type in "setup_var 0x19D" (should return 0x0) << this is to check
6) type in "setup_var 0x19D 0x1"
7) type in "setup_var 0x19D" (should return 0x1) << this is to check
8) reboot and set your bios (if not set already) to RAID, then use CTRL + I to get into the Intel Raid setup, create your array, and off you go.

https://www.sendspace.com/file/fq42ib

(never used sendspace before, let me know if it doesnt work)

 

Followed these steps on my new e7440 and it worked like a charm. Took all of 5 minutes to do.

 

Question for you, did you do anything special to get those numbers? Im using the exact same drives with a 4310u and 8gb of ram and im getting ~280MB writes

Edit: Didnt mean to double post.