Five SSDs In RAID 0
The five SSDs used in the test come from Samsung. They do not have any strong product name, carrying only “Samsung SLC SSD“ and the product tag MZ3S9100-XAB4. Each drive has a capacity of 100 GB, is based on SLC NAND flash, has a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, and support for TRIM and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Samsung claims 260 MB/s read and 245 MB/s write rates.
With an idle energy consumption of 1.7 W, this SSD requires much more than consumer models. It reaches 3.7 W under load, which is still acceptable compared to enterprise-class hard drives spinning at 10 000 and 15 000 RPM. Conventional disks can reach up to four times that number. Operating temperature is rated at between -10°C and 60°C, which is fairly standard in the SSD space. Samsung also offers a 200 GB model, should you need more server storage capacity.
In order to demonstrate the scalability as clearly as possible, we first benchmarked one of these SSDs and then created a RAID 0 array of two drives. With each new benchmark run, we added an additional drive so that, in the end, we can compare five test configurations and their differences easily.
Of course, the fast (but unsafe) RAID 0 mode is only used in special cases, while RAID modes with built-in redundancy are typically preferred. For this test however, we deliberately chose RAID 0, since it represents a best case for the kind of scaling we can expect.
