Mixed Workloads And Steady State
Comparison Products
Intel SSD 750 (400GB)
SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB
Samsung 850 Pro 512GB
Sequential Mixed Workload Performance
Benchmarking mixed workloads gives us a better look at more real-world applications of storage. If you feel you need what NVMe has to offer, then there's a good chance you multitask. RAID gives you a higher ceiling under these conditions...providing you have a workload able to exploit it.
Random Mixed Workload Performance
Again, we see that RAID 0 doesn't give us much of an advantage at low queue depths. The NVMe-based drives even have a hard time pulling away from today's best SATA-based SSDs.
That leaves us with better performance only in sequential workloads.
Sequential Steady State Performance
The speed-up in sequential transfers carries over to SSDs in steady state. Given these results, it's safe to say you'll see gains in any read/write mix, so long as the operations are sequential in nature. If your primary application is audio and video editing, RAID is a good way to trim your render times (provided storage is your bottleneck).
Random Steady State Performance
We rarely get a chance to show how random 4KB writes in steady state carry over to RAID 0 arrays. With each doubling of drive count, any performance inconsistencies also double. That's why, in this test, we look for drives without large peaks or valleys to call out as potential champions in multi-drive configurations.