SSD RAID: Do You Want A Cheap Array Or One Larger Drive?
Table of contents
- 1. Should You Go For SSD RAID?
- 2. Kingston SSDNow V 30 GB (RAID 0)
- 3. SandForce SSD: Zalman N-Series
- 4. SSD RAID Configuration Issues
- 5. Test Setup
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.
We were recently given the opportunity to take a look at a new SSD from the Korean manufacturer Zalman. Solid state drives are new to the firm’s product lineup, which includes cooling products, cases, and storage accessories. The N-series SSD at 64 or 128 GB isn’t a game changer, but it is a strong product thanks to its SandForce controller architecture.
Therefore, we thought that it might be a nice candidate for the ultimate SSD shootout: should users go for two or four small SSDs in RAID, or select a single, higher-capacity drive? We put Zalman’s 128 GB N-series drive up against two and four Kingston SSDNow V drives that store 30 GB each.
SSDs at 120 GB or higher capacities still suffer at the hands of relatively high prices compared to mechanical hard drives, effectively making the really nice products unaffordable for a majority of users. Thus, it's logical that enthusiasts looking for performance would consider utilizing the software-based RAID controllers that can be found on the majority of today's motherboards. What has worked well with hard drives should also do the trick with SSDs, right?
Even basic, entry-level platforms come with Serial ATA storage controllers that support the elementary RAID levels 0 and 1 for striping or mirroring. The latter is useful for high reliability systems, while striping based on RAID 0 effectively multiplies throughput performance by the number of drives used.
Knowing that a Kingston SSDNow V bundle with two 30 GB SSDs costs only $150, it is worth looking into the real world performance of such a setup. To make this worthwhile, even for hardcore enthusiasts, we decided to install up to four of these 30 GB SSDs in RAID 0, as the total cost of $300 puts you into the price range of an individual 120/128 GB SSD based on SandForce hardware.
The benchmark section of this article puts two and four Kingston SSDNow 30 GB drives in RAID 0 (60, 120 GB) up against Zalman’s 128 GB N-series drive.
- Storage,
- ssd ,
- raid ,
- performance
Latest Internal Storage News
Latest Internal Storage reviews
- 16/05 – Intel SSD 330 Review: 60, 120, And 180 GB Models Benchmarked
- 11/05 – Do-It-Yourself: Upgrading Apple's 27" iMac With An SSD
- 01/05 – Marvell-Based SSDs From Corsair, Crucial, OCZ, And Plextor:...
- 26/04 – Best SSDs For The Money: April 2012
- 25/04 – Hitachi's 4 TB Hard Drives Take On The 3 TB Competition
First thoughts, before even reading the article, I would rather have TRIM.
I would be more interested in RAID5 with 4 drives. Will look forward to the follow-up!
The big thing I get from this article is, regardless of single drive or array, you want a decent SSD to begin with - RAIDing up those (comparitvely) poor Kingston drives doesn't overcome their inherent flaws against other SSDs.
What I'm looking at personally is 2 60GB OCZ Vertex 2E against a single 120GB Vertex 2E (or 3 60GB vs a single 180GB) - the former is only £20 more, but will I get a performance boost to justify it?
I would compare instead a Ramdrive with 20GB and SSDs raided on the same budget. And then find out if there is a sweet spot combining both, instead of trying to compare outdated SSDs with a larger new one.
Who has the money to have SSD in raid!? my god.
Agree with LePhuronn's comment above, in that there's little point comparing shonky SSDs in R0 with a single much better one... You want apples with apples, not apples with spider monkeys or sloths or...
The conclusion starts with "This article aims at enthusiasts who want to maximize storage performance and those who want to know how to best spend their money: by either purchasing a single SSD or by going with a couple of low-budget, low-capacity solid state drives.", however these are clearly not the only two choices for ~the same expenditure & it's foolish to suggest that they are.
Okay, it's possible to go all out (atm am currently running 4x 50GB OCZ V2s in R0 on a 9260-8i & the speeds (not simply sequential ones) are pretty snazzy...), but the cost differential between 1 larger 3Gb/s SSD & 2 SSDs of the same model/brand that are half the size (which can be run in R0 with no bandwidth limitation on at least the latter ich controllers) is minimal...
So just seems like a bit of a half-arsed experiment...