*** Official Sager NP8180 / Clevo P180HM Owners Lounge ***

I've looked into both of you guys' recommendation and I couldn't agree more - I'm going to make that upgrade really soon after receiving it. Thanks...

 

Just a heads up on SSDs in RAID...right now TRIM support is disabled when you do it, but I believe there should soon be an Intel RST update containing TRIM support when SSDs are in RAID.

TRIM support is very important for SSDs to retain their speed, and also longevity, so just a heads up.

 

Hmm, I wonder if the setup menu is different. Does yours look like this?

P180HM_BIOS_Screens.zip

 

Try to post those pics here and ill compare to see if the options are the same.

 

A lot of newer drives have a default garbage collection as well. TRIM is probably better though.

If RAID is used, I recommend a stripe size of 128k, as well as creating an aligned disk partition during install to 128k. You can follow this guide. You don't have to use the repair option listed in this walkthrough. You can do it during the installation wizard after loading the RAID drivers using shift+F10, which will bring up a command prompt. Then, you select the partition you created using this guide.

Righthooks Guide to RAID with Solid State Drives and Multi Disk file Management | Trubritar News

Here is a lot of good advice for tweaking Windows for SSD use. You will see conflicting arguments about "write-caching" and page files. I personally disabled write-back caching from the device manager and enabled write-back caching in the Intel RST to great effect, and I keep a page file at a static 2gb. Anything regarding AHCI and TRIM will be irrelevant in a RAID configuration.

This is a good all around guide: The SSD Optimization Guide - The SSD Review

This guy has several additional novel tweaks: Windows 7 - SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7

If you are using RAID 0, schedule a regular system image backup to another drive in case one of the RAID drives fail because you will lose all data in that scenario.

Here are my read speeds before and after RST write-back caching with the windows device manager write-back caching on:



And this is with the device manager write-back caching off and the RST write-back caching off then on: