SSD RAID: Do You Want A Cheap Array Or One Larger Drive?

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You're on a budget. You want to know if it'd be better to stripe a couple of smaller SSDs or simply buy one larger performance-oriented drive. Today we're comparing one, two, and four 30 GB Kingston SSDNow V drives to Zalman’s new 128 GB N-series SSD.

Test Setup

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 4 x 512 KB L2 Cache, 8 MB L3 Cache)
Motherboard (LGA 1366) Supermicro X8SAX Revision: 1.0, Chipset Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3 x 1 GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
Controller HighPoint Rocket 620, 2 x SATA 6Gb/s, Marvell 88SE9128
System Drive Seagate NL35 400 GB, ST3400832NS, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache
Power Supply OCZ EliteXstream 800 W, OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance Measurements CrystalDiskMark 3.0h2benchw 3.16PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0
I/O Performance IOMeter 2008.08.18Fileserver BenchmarkWebserver BenchmarkDatabase BenchmarkWorkstation BenchmarkStreaming ReadsStreaming Writes4K Random Reads4K Random Writes
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate
Intel Rapid Storage Manager Version 9.6