Breaking Records With SSDs: 16 Intel X25-Es Do 2.2 GB/s

Array Creation, Part 2: The Operating System Level

Now we have two RAID 0 arrays, each with eight Intel X25-E flash SSDs. But since we know that the maximum PCI Express bandwidth upstream and downstream on a x8 connection is 2 GB/s, we still have to create a software RAID, which puts these two arrays in an OS-controlled RAID 0. We launched Windows’s disk management and created a software RAID array using the two hardware arrays.

Two dynamic disks of 475 GB are ready to be used.

Right-click one of the controller arrays and select “new striped volume” to create a new RAID array, which will be set up by Windows.

Select both virtual disks, so they can be used in a new RAID 0 array.

A drive letter has to be selected for most benchmarks.

Windows has to convert the virtual disks, which consists of the controllers’ RAID 0 arrays, into dynamic disks.

The new color code tells you that the two disks are being used as a striped volume, which has been assigned the drive letter D: