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

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

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.

Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Reads/Writes

4 KB Random Reads

Zalman’s new N-series SSD doesn’t beat other SandForce drives and has to concede defeat to Intel and Crucial, but it is much faster compared to the RAID array consisting or two or four Kingston SSDNow V 30 GB SSDs.

The results are almost repeated by CrystalDiskMark.

4 KB Random Writes

The Zalman N-series SSD does amazingly well in the 4 KB random writes test, but none of the Kingston-powered setups are very convincing.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos