How Do SSDs Redefine Storage Performance?

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

It only takes one or two modern SSDs to outperform business-class RAID arrays with four or eight hard drives. We're running a full comparison and looking at the implications for high-performance systems when you make the transition to flash-based tech.

Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput And Streaming

These results don’t come unexpected. The hard drive RAID array is faster when it comes to high throughput just because there are up to eight drives. However, the two SSDs manage to sustain their 530+ MB/s throughput level constantly, while the drives drop to 430 MB/s.

Peak write transfer rates look amazingly high due to the controller’s caching abilities. Look at average and minimum results for realistic numbers.

Interface performance reflects the storage subsystem’s ability to maximize the impact of the integrated RAID cache memory. Effectively, this number is good for analysis but expect to see it in real life.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos