Idea: The Raid 0 drive.

Sharcs

Sharcs

Sharcs

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I was just sitting there thinking, as one does, then an idea popped into my head.

Would it be possible for a manufacturer to create a single drive that's been configured in Raid 0, effectively doubling (or close to doubling) the drive speed?

Let me explain. We all know that solid state drives consist of a bunch of chips that retain the data. What if, instead of those chips coming together to work as one drive, they were configured to work as two separate drives with the raid 0 software embedded into the SSD firmware?

The Raid 0 SSD would also have two SATA connectors so that the drive plugs into two separate SATA ports onto the motherboard and the computer would see it as two drives in Raid 0.

E.g. instead of having one 512gb drive, the computer reads it as two 256gb drives.

What you guys think? Is this a good idea or should I just go back to playing Mafia Wars and leave the thinking to the grown-ups?
 
The issue would be people buying it without understanding the risks involved in a raid 0 setup.
 
seabiscuit said:
With SSD's, wouldn't you be limited by the bandwidth of the SATA connection?
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That's why the drive uses two SATA connectors. It's basically two mini drives in one regular sized enclosure.

Hotwired said:
Don't some SSD already do this?
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Not really, they work as one drive with one connector. The way I see it is, if you can get better performance by setting up two SSDs into a raid 0 array, then you should be able to do the same by splitting one into two and setting those halves into Raid 0.
 
I could see this being a reasonable idea for mechanical drives about 4-5 years ago when SSDs were extremely expensive, and low capacity, however with the current prevalence of SSDs, I don't really see the point?
 
Haggisman said:
I could see this being a reasonable idea for mechanical drives about 4-5 years ago when SSDs were extremely expensive, and low capacity, however with the current prevalence of SSDs, I don't really see the point?
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Actually this wouldn't work with mechanical drives because unlike SSDs, mechanical drives are limited to one head and one set of platters. With SSDs you can allocate a set of chips to work independently as one drive and another set to work as another.

Also, with this idea, you can effectively get raid 0 speeds from an SSD with little to no extra cost. It's just a regular SSD with updated firmware and an extra SATA port. As long as you have the extra SATA port on your mobo and your mobo supports raid 0, you're good to go.
 
Already exists for HDDs. Dunno if they still sell them but WD used to do "fat" external HDDs which were just two HDDs in RAID 0 in an oversized caddy. These days it's not really needed but I seem to remember they did 3-4 TB versions before single drives with those capacities were widespread.

Seems utterly pointless for SSDs, particularly SATA ones.
 
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