Which SSD? Your process appears mostly correct, but you do need to consider alignment. Acronis, like versions of Windows prior to Vista, uses a 63-sector offset when creating partitions. That works well and good when you have a magnetic drive with 512-byte sectors as the absolute unit of drive interaction, but is very bad when you use a SSD or one of the new WD 4K-sector-with-512b-emulation drives. Without going into a great amount of detail, you want your partitions to be aligned to a multiple of 4096 bytes (4K), rather than the 63 sectors x 512 bytes = 31.5K that Windows XP and earlier and Acronis use. Otherwise, you can drastically reduce performance of the drive.
Acronis actually maintains alignment in a few unique circumstances, but usually it resets the partitions to use its outdated standard. The best way to ensure your alignment is correct is to use Windows Vista or Windows 7 to create your actual partitions on the drive, and then use Acronis in volume (as opposed to whole-disk) mode and restore your backup's data into those volumes. You can also use the Vista/W7 installation media to do this--simply boot to the disc or USB drive, and continue with the installation to the disk management page. Create your partitions here and you will be properly aligned. Close the installer at this screen after creating your partitions--if you click next, it will go ahead and install Windows. To check your alignment, run msinfo32.exe. Components, Storage, Disks. The Partition Starting Offset (in bytes) for each partition on your boot drive should be evenly divisible by 4096. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Winterlight > Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2010 6:59 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [H] OS on RAID 0 ?? > > I have very little experience with RAID as I never found it useful > for my needs. But now I do think I have a use for it. > > Last Dec I picked up a 30GB SSD for 100 bucks, mostly just to play > around with it, as 30GB isn't big enough for windows 7 OS. I have my > pagefile on it and I will run whatever game I am playing for faster > load times. It is OK, although I haven't had the spectacular > experience that I have read about from others. The biggest thing that > I noticed is that I was able to tell VMWare to swap out all the > memory and use as little physical memory as possible, which freed up > lots of physical RAM and VM performance actually improved. > > Today I see my exact SSD on sale and I am thinking about buying it > and then RAID 0 with the existing one which should now be big enough > = 60GB to run windows 7 from. Right now I have a Raptor, with one > primary active as the Win7 system drive, and then three logicals for > various other things. All other drives are partitioned as one big > logical. I have one more SATA port available to put the SSD on. > > First I would use Acronis to backup the existing active primary with > Win7 on it. > > Then I would have to set up the RAID 0 with the two identical SSDs. > > At that point I could delete the active primary partition on the > Raptor, and set the bios up to boot from the RAID 0 SSDs > > Restore the system to the SSD > > And then boot up into windows 7. > > Do I have the process right? Would this work ? It is not a > problamatic setup is it? Can I have the OS and boot drive entirely on a > RAID 0. > > thanks > > w
