SSD Raiding

[cnbanister]

Can you raid SSDs?

If you can, are there significant performance gains?

Are there any speed comparisons between raided SSDs and raided HDDs on this site?

 

[sub mesa]

Yes but make sure you align your paritions well to avoid misalignment (Windows 7 does this properly). The obivous RAID-level is RAID0 which provides good performance gains for parallel I/O and sequential throughput.

Generally its better to spent your money on a better SSD (meaning: a better controller) like the Intel X25-M, because this can provide more IOps than two slower SSDs in RAID0, especially for writing. But now that Intel's X25-M has dropped in price (*) nothing stands in the way from using two of them in a RAID0 configuration on onboard RAID or something; not that expensive and should be quite fast. Intel ICHxR "MatrixRAID" and nVidia "MediaShield" RAID offer the best drivers for onboard RAID to my knowledge.

I would also like to note that the biggest bottleneck in I/O performance is still the software; the problem is that you can't change that on your own but you can make things faster by investing in faster hardware. But the storage I/O bottleneck will only disappear when operating systems begin utilizing parallel I/O in an efficient way, while right now much I/O is done in serial operation. The cool thing is: in the future SSDs would be able to process thousands of I/O requests simultaniously, since these lie in different cells and thus can operate independent from eachother. But to make this dream come true advanced SSD controllers will have to be designed and operating systems will also have to change. Surely, storage will no longer be the obvious weak link in future computing.

*) http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13289&Itemid=1

 

[daship]

Raid 0 SSD is the ***. Talk about point and click. Night and day difference. If you want to get into raid SSd look at raiding some of the 30G OCZ Vertex SSD, 2 drives will score over 500MB/s n hdtune. Run HDtune on your current rig and you will see the difference you can expect. Also raid drives have .2 access times which is basically instant.