RAID SSD Benefits

kayomani · 6 Mar 2009 at 17:08

I am at the inital stages of deciding what to put in a new rig but am wondering:

Is it better to buy 2 smaller SDDs and raid them up or just buy a larger version? I know a lot of SDDs use raid internally / have more channels but then again benchmarks i've seen from folks raiding whole drives far exceeds what i'd expect for a normal drive.

Take for example: OCZ Vertex Series 120GB vs 2x OCZ Vertex Series 60GB vs 4x OCZ Vertex Series 30GB (If i had the case space!)

Awire · 6 Mar 2009 at 17:53

i'd say go for a single large SSD. if you have the money to buy one in the first place then the 160MB/s+ read speed is lightning fast anyway. you'll prob spend more money buying more smaller drives.

drunkenmaster · 6 Mar 2009 at 18:54

well vertex's are looking better and better, and although its early my first bench on the cheap samsung 64gb isn't as promising as i'd hoped. lots reported 160mb's reads on it while mine sits at the rated 100mb mark, but theres tweaking to be done, testing them in single drive setup at the moment, will raid them later. Was hoping to get closer to the 160mb's reads that others had reported. I wonder if theres a large mix of various firmwares on the drives and its pot luck, or well anything to be honest. They were preformated(with names in japanese writing which makes for an odd windows explorer list) so they could easily be misalligned and no where near the "optimum" allignment aswell. The writes aren't bad though from atto, 43mb's at 4kb file size which is pretty decent.

Don't buy a vertex yet though, the 60gb is supposed to drop into the £150ish price range pretty soon which I think, look at this drive, makes it significantly faster with 180-230mb's reads, and hopefully with a new firmware soon 130mb/s with random writes which would be awesome.

SkaterNatty · 6 Mar 2009 at 19:10

Hi kayomani

Might I suggest you have a look here for a wealth of SSD info, tweaks and RAID advice.

I've personally got 2 OCZ Core v2's in RAID0 and this is what I've got out of them with just my onboard controller

Natty

NickK · 6 Mar 2009 at 22:53

Err 12ms access time - something is very wrong there.

edit - looking at the wrong graph... lol tis late..