Four X25-E Extreme SSDs Combined In Hardware RAID

theraindog writes "Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is easily the fastest flash drive on the market, and contrary to what one might expect, it actually delivers compelling value if you're looking at performance per dollar rather than gigabytes. That, combined with a rackmount-friendly 2.5" form factor and low power consumption make the drive particularly appealing for enterprise RAID. So just how fast are four of them in a striped array hanging off a hardware RAID controller? The Tech Report finds out, with mixed but at times staggeringly impressive results."

Comments

Re:Oh good

[ChienAndalu]

Make that 228 years.

Life expectancy 2 Million Hours Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF)

Hint: learn about "wear leveling"

Re:Oh good

[spazdor]

Your enterprise environment must not be hitting its drives very hard.

Where SSDs is in disk operations that are usually lagged out by seek times; a big unwieldy database that gets a lot of writes and no downtime, for instance, is happiest when it lives on a striped SSD array.

Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of workload which is most likely to shorten a magnetic drive's life.

Re:Oh good

[FauxPasIII]

> 'cause SSD's don't cost $300-$500 more than their spindle counterparts, yep yep.

Hint: Enterprise storage purchasing often looks at dollars/IOPS rather than dollars/GB.

Re:Redundant Array of what?

[afidel]

Dude, 4 of these drives can keep up with my 110 spindle FC SAN segment for IOPS. Here's a hint, 110 drives plus SAN controllers is about two orders of magnitude more expensive than 4 SSD's and a RAID card. If you need IOPS (say for the log directory on a DB server) these drives are hard to beat. The applications may be niche, but they certainly DO exist.