Hypothetical question, RAID0 with SSD? :)

Temp_185 · 30 Jan 2008 at 16:44

Hello readers, I read OcUK every day but post infrequently.

Anyway, I'm looking at dumping a truck load of cash into a new machine sometime soon (I'm waiting to see the QX9770 and if Creative ever get round to releasing the PCI-E Audigy I read about :/) in the mean time however I've taken quite the interest in the SSD's and so I've been wondering what these things will be like in RAID0, first off would it work? and would the benefits be insane? would it be able to max out the Sata2 bus etc...

I'm currently running 2 15k SAS drives in RAID0 so an upgrade to SSD wouldn't be overwhelming compared to if I ran some common HDD's or something. (though to be honest they seem sluggish >.<)

I don't think I'd mind the "slow" write speed of SSD as my system is set up so that I have a fast system drive for OS and games etc... then a larger storage drive for everything else.

So does anyone have any info on this? site links and/or experience? or anything just to discuss.

Thanks for your time!

Mercutio · 30 Jan 2008 at 16:58

In theory raiding the SSD drives should give fairly decent returns. I think they have issues with some controllers however, theres a don/man of honour on the forums (it MIGHT be rilot) who got a couple of them and had trouble with the intel onboard raid controller.

But from theory side your adding extra drives with access/seek time in the nanosecond range so performance should be rather impressive. I think the drives do around 55/60MBish/s read so depending what bus you use (PCIe 1x or better being good and far from expensive) and how many drives you were buying it could get quite tastey

With (large amounts of) cash available I would probably be dropping 8 on a rocketraid and see what it can do

strudey · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:32

Check this out - pretty incredible figures. RAID is definately an option it seems.

Temp_185 · 31 Jan 2008 at 01:38

Thanks for the input guys.

I read the link you gave strudey, the pure numerics of it all seem insane but I noticed a trend of there being little difference between having one drive or nine in real world performance so that's kind of answered my question about raiding a couple of SSDs, though at the end of the article I did spot this;

http://www.fusionio.com/ (count as a 'competitor'? shouldn't do, they don't sell anything yet >.< sorry if it does)

That seems really interesting and at $30/gb doesn't sound too bad to me, question is - is it vapourware :confused:

Energize · 31 Jan 2008 at 16:26

Games don't really benefit from raid0 as the access time of the drives is still bottlenecking the transfer rate. Moving to ssd will certainly improve game loading times though as the latency is much lower than scsi.