M4600 : Runcore mSATA3 and Vertex3 in raid 0

Now I use OCZ Revodrive2 in my desktop workstation which pretty often run at almost max speed (700+ Mb/s) for the engineering simulation work that could reduce calculation time a lot (compare to my old sas 1.5K)

Now I'm waiting for M4600 that just ordered and thinking about how to run the ssd as fast as possible (at least not less than Revodrive). Then I found someone in forum talk about new runcore mSATA 6Gb/s 120GB launching ;

Runcore Pro V 6GB mSATAIII 120GB RCP-V-T5028-MC

So I wonder if I could exploit its performance if I go with Vertex 3 120GB in Raid 0 and how much the speed should I get.

Thank you very much.

 

isn't the mini pci-e SATA 2 in the M4600 laptop ?

 

That's one of my concern, not sure whether the mini pci-e sata in M4600 is SATA2 or SATA3.
Can anyone please comfirm this ?
Thank you.

 

While RAID 0 for SSDs can yield some pretty impressive speeds initially, that speed can deteriorate pretty dramatically. TRIM only functions on single SSDs not ones in a RAID array, so as you fill up and use the drive, the speed of the SSDs will settle into a fully degraded state.

This happened to me a short time after I RAID 0'd 2x 256GB SSDs.

 

You're completely correct, but Sandforce-based drives hold up much better under RAID than anything else does. I wouldn't have any concerns about RAID 0 with Sandforce drives such as the Runcore and the Vertex3.

 

I was under the impression that Marvel-based drives (like Crucial m4) did much better than SandForce-based drives in non-TRIM environments, such as RAID. The Marvel controller has much more aggressive idle time garbage collection independent of TRIM.

From: Crucial M4 256GB SSD Review - Page 12

 

Thank you very much for your great opinion.
I'll go for only 1 vertex 3 then.

 

Does anyone know which ports on the M4600 that supports SATA 3? Does the CD-Rom Port support SATA 3? If it's switched with a harddrive?

 

The Dell M4600 has an Intel QM67 Express chipset. If you look at the specs at the Intel website for this chipset, you will see only ports 0 and 1 support SATA 6 Gb/s.

Then you only need to know which port is wired to what. The thing is, I can only see 4 ports in the BIOS and these are ports 0,3,4 and 5. So port 1 is not there, but then I do not have anything in the WWAN/mSATA port and very curious if that is related.
If you have windows installed and the Intel RST tool installed as well, you can see what device is connected to what port.
The normal hard drive is at port 0, so SATA 6 Gb/s is possible there.
The DVD-drive is at port 3, so SATA 3 Gb/s (aka SATA Rev. 2.0) maximum.
The other 2 ports (4 and 5) will be for eSATA connections (don't know which port for the eSATAp onboard and the one in the E-Port Plus Replicator).

Is there anyone who has actially bought the M4600 with the mSATA SSD installed please report what port (as indicated by the Intel RST tool) is used for it

 

I already found it myself, a colleague has an M4600 with the Samsung mSATA and it's on port 2 so it is 3Gb/s max (SATA rev.2). There is still a benefit for the runcore because of the higher 4k IOPS for writes (important if you run your OS from this disk) and good response times but for sequential writes and reads you will max out at 260 MB/s (which is still not bad)

I think I will go for the cheaper OCZ Nocti 120GB.