How Do SSDs Redefine Storage Performance?

Can RAID Beat The SSD?

LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i

Please also look at the article Another Record Broken: 6 Gb/s SAS, 16 SSDs, 3.4 GB/s, which also utilizes this LSI RAID controller.

RAID Drives: Four and Eight MBA3147RC SAS Drives

We used four and eight drives in RAID 0 setups attached to the aforementioned LSI RAID controller. We can already tell that the hard drives should outperform the two SSDs when it comes to throughput, but they might fall short if I/O performance is what you need most.

Another item to watch is system power consumption. We use our customary idle, workstation, and video streaming power consumption tests, but we're tracking system power consumption at the wall. Given that we’re working on a Supermicro X58-based enterprise-class motherboard and a powerful (but not overly efficient) power supply, this represents a realistic consumption footprint for a roughly two-year-old workstation.

Our power consumption results differ markedly, ranging from 133 W in idle with the two SSDs up to 229 W in active idle with the eight 15 000 RPM hard drives. Amazingly, the differences between idle and peak power consumption under intensive storage workloads doesn’t differ much. Knowing this, the implications for performance per watt are plainly impressive. Let’s look at the results now.