10 TB for $1,000: Tom’s Hardware's Über RAID Array

I/O Performance

Since XOR calculation for data parity imposes a significant performance penalty, I/O performance is far superior in RAID 0, which has no parity. Still, any decent SSD, such as Intel’s X25-E (enterprise) or X25-M (consumer), can beat even our 12-drive RAID’s results on IOPS.

File server performance involves larger blocks, making the difference between the individual drive and the arrays less significant but still large.

The Web server profile is entirely based on read operations, and it only requests the kind of small files commonly found on HTML pages. Using 12 drives, we achieved greater than four times the performance of a single drive. However, a fast SSD still scores up to ten times faster.