Intel SSDs RAIDed up for blinding speed

Intel's hot X25-M SSD is one of the faster drives out there, and while it's not surprising that a RAID 0 array of two of the $600 units is quick, it turns out it's actually one of the fastest RAID 0 arrays ever. At least that's the word from the crew at HotHardware, who say that two X25-Ms kicked out the fastest IOMeter numbers they've ever seen, and produced 396MB/s reads and 130MB/s writes. Yeah, damn. Anyone going to take the $1200 trip to Speedville?

[Mike @ Oct 20th 2008 8:01AM]

No.

[Ding @ Oct 20th 2008 8:04AM]

EVER?

What about the MTron RAID?

http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/

[ArcticFox @ Oct 20th 2008 8:33AM]

Go read that link, 9 of them in raid, these are only 2 intel, put 9 intel in raid and then see.

[bongo123 @ Oct 20th 2008 8:08AM]

whats this got to do with the iphone?

[John @ Oct 20th 2008 9:36AM]

lol that never gets old.

[icepop4who @ Oct 20th 2008 9:52AM]

sorry, so many people don't appreciate your humor

[Reebo @ Oct 20th 2008 8:24AM]

I confess I have not been following a ton of the details on SSDs lately but don't they all still suffer from the same MTBF issues of earlier SSD with a finite write lifetime? I mean, I know they are the cool thing to talk about in the news lately, but am I the only one who looks at them and still sees them as toys?

[strider_mt2k @ Oct 20th 2008 8:44AM]

Short answer: The cheap ones yes, a bit still. The expensive ones not so much.

[Phil Perman @ Oct 20th 2008 8:46AM]

Yes that is still an issue, but the drives are getting better all the time, and the Intel SSD is meant to have very good wear leveling.

Another drive feature is they usually (in the case of the Intel, others probably have too) have additional space reserved on top of the stated drive capacity to replace and sectors when they become unusable. You can then use SMART utilities to see how much of this reserved space has been used giving you a nice bit of warning if your drive is about to die, unlike you get on hard drives which usually go without any warning

[David @ Oct 20th 2008 12:19PM]

No, they have not suffered this problem in ages. If you look at the minimum number of writes on them, take into account wear leveling, almost all SSDs you could rewrite the entire drive 10 times a day, and it would still outlast a mechanical HDD by years.

[loosely_coupled @ Oct 21st 2008 4:38AM]

NO. Those are problems from yesteryear. I have read many articles about this.. and I don't have specific numbers memorized, but I remember that in the case of a relatively normal user/enthusiast (aka someone who is not overwriting the entire disk 10 times per day) who has an average use pattern, even an MLC drive should outlast the useful life of a computer using it. As in 5+ years easily. The NAND technology has gotten better and new drives have intelligent wear leveling and "reserve" memory cells for when cells wear out. For heavy-duty 24-hour server use where data is being overwritten constantly, the SLC drives (faster and more expensive) provide over 10X the service lifetime of MLC drives.

Either way, unlike a conventional harddrive which normally experiences catastrophic failure at the end of it's life (and the resulting data loss), even when all the cells of an SSD drive finally wear out, the whole drive just becomes read-only --- no data loss.

[Rob @ Oct 20th 2008 8:50AM]

Surely a better comparison would be against other RAIDed setups i.e. a pair of Raptor drives etc. Would give a much better prepresentation of how fast it is.

[John @ Oct 20th 2008 11:11AM]

Don't call me Shirley.

[GregH @ Oct 20th 2008 4:17PM]

If the other drives were put in RAID 0 (2 drive array), wouldn't the speed be slightly less than double the speed of the single disk? If so, it seems like the Intel drives would still blow the others out of the water.

Or am I totally misunderstanding things here?

[scape @ Oct 20th 2008 9:14AM]

why was the comparison against non raided drives? how about you RAID two 10k or 15k (pretty common amongst RAIDs) and pit it against this setup?
apples to apples...

[MojoKid @ Oct 20th 2008 9:48AM]

That's just a Sandra test screenshot with the benchmark's included reference test numbers. There was only a comparison to RAID and non-RAID modes with just the Intel drives, if you read the source article.

[pball_inuyaha @ Oct 20th 2008 9:55AM]

But that would be fair. oO wait your supposed to compare things to similar things. /sarcasm

Yeah that would be nice to see, but the people who have more money than brains will see these high numbers then lay down large numbers of bills to get some of these drives.

Besides I was always told life isn't fair.

[kal326 @ Oct 20th 2008 9:11AM]

"We're going to have to go right to...Ludicrous speed... Ludicrous speed? Sir, we've never gone that fast before..."

For $1200, it better be ludirous speed....

[Randy @ Oct 20th 2008 9:36AM]

1200 is a lot of coin for your Pee Cee, yes. But if speed is Necessity then you can't really balk at price. there are $1200 SLI setups.

But if we're talking about a Sever Scenario, then $1200 is nothing really.

[poppadot @ Oct 20th 2008 10:08AM]

that's way past plaid speed... the big question is can fugitsu put it in a $3999 12" sub notebook?

[casen.payne @ Oct 20th 2008 11:13AM]

It only used the basic onboard RAID controller as well. Generally speaking you can get a lot better performance out of a dedicated controller.

[Curtis Joslin @ Oct 20th 2008 1:18PM]

Dedicated hardware based raid solutions are great when it comes to math orriented raids such as raid 5 and raid6 where it has to do on the fly parity calculation.. raid 1 or 0 would really see no speed benefit in normal circumstances with software assisted motherboard raid solutions.

[Sharone @ Oct 20th 2008 12:44PM]

WANT!!

[FinDog @ Oct 20th 2008 5:09PM]

So, can I order a laptop from say Dell with a bottom of the line HDD and swap it out for 2 of these 80GB SSDs? If so how difficult would it be?

[loosely_coupled @ Oct 21st 2008 4:39AM]

Amazing, and these are the cheap MLC drives! I want to see the Intel SLC SSDs raided!

[deathtospam @ Oct 21st 2008 1:42PM]

I'd rather see how these perform in a RAID-5 and RAID-6.