4 way SSD raid doesnt feel as fast as it should be?

Hardware HDD's & SSD's
1

So a friend of mine somehow convinced me to do a bit crazy storage upgrade (since im waiting on the next nvidia and intel series before updating other things). So, i decided to do a 4 way 240gb SSD raid 0 array(with a 64k stripe size) and... im getting wat feel like worse speed then when i had a single SSD.

I understand that my boot time should be a bit slower since im using a raid card for the raid array and it needs time to initialize. but it feels as though my computer is acting sluggish. I've run CrystalDiskMark and its showing a very low increase in read speeds and double in write speed.

PS: im running the array on a fresh windows install (windows 7 64-bit)

PS2: incase anyone asks, the reason im using a raid card is becuase my mobo does support 4 way raid but if i do so the remaining 2 sata ports are only able to be used in IDE mode, and since i wanna keep hot-swappability with my hdd i cant do IDE mode, however i have no qualms with moving my HDD to the raid card and the SSDs to the mobo if it will help my speeds.

 

Additional info:

- CrystalDiskMark Results

- Raid Card I'm Using

- SSDs I'm Using

- Total Build

 

Thanks again for any help.

2

The card has bandwidth enough for two of the drives read speed-wise, so the result looks reasonable. Striping more than two SSD's together often leads to very noticeably diminishing returns. Maybe two are simply awesome enough after all? ;-) 

3

right on the specs page it says 500mb/s per pci-e lane that pretty much the speed of one decent ssd, cant go faster than the PCI lane

4

well shoot... i feel like an idiot now... guess thats what i get for not reading up on it as much as i should've. Will try raid with the onboard raid controller and put the hot-swap hdd on the card and see how the speeds change

5

You could try to use RAPID if you're using Samsung SSDs. Well you could only use RAPID on 1 SSD though. Those 4 SSDs would be a waste..