SSDs In RAID: A Performance Scaling Analysis

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RAID arrays with dozens of hard drives are not uncommon for reaching certain performance levels. We demonstrate how beautifully SSD RAID arrays can scale. There may come a time when a few flash-based drives will replace entire farms of hard disks.

Benchmark Results: Iometer Streaming

Speed enthusiasts will get their money’s worth when it comes to sequential read rates. With five drives, the RAID array has peak data throughputs of 1000 MB/s (read) and 1122 MB/s (write). The latter is faster due to the RAID controller’s caching. More importantly, each added drive increases the performance by about the same value, scaling almost linearly.