Although DV Nation asked us to test the Memoright drives with an Areca controller because of their excellent throughput, we used Adaptec’s new 5805 Unified Serial RAID controller, as it turned out to be the better product at this point in time. While the management software is more advanced, we found this product to deliver both excellent throughput and I/O performance (which hasn’t always been the case with Adaptec’s devices in the past).

Adaptec’s RAID 5805 is one of the fastest and most powerful Unified Serial RAID controllers (for SAS and SATA) available today.

Test HDDs: 2.5” Seagate Savvio 10K.2 and 3.5” WD Raptor WD1500

Seagate Savvio 10K.2: 10,000 RPM, 2.5” and a SAS interface. These are excellent server drives for high-density storage applications.

We decided to not only compare the Memoright flash SDD to the entire range of mechanical and flash-based competitors, but to also go one more step. We used four 2.5” Seagate Savvio 10K.2 enterprise SAS drives and four 3.5” Western Digital WD1500 Raptor drives, both of which can be considered as best in their class. The Raptor still is an excellent system drive for enthusiast systems (although its successor, the VelociRaptor, is considerably better) and Seagate’s Savvio 10K.2 is a backbone for high-density storage servers. We compared four of each in a RAID 0 setup against four Memoright Flash SSDs in a RAID 0 setup to show the maximum performance potential.

Although beaten by its predecessor, the good-old 3.5” Raptor by Western Digital still is a de-facto standard for enthusiasts and entry-level servers.