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

[spazdor]

'cause regular hard drives usually survive 5 years in an enterprise environment, yep yep.

Re:Oh good

[LordKaT]

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

Re:Oh good

[poot_rootbeer]

I'll be sure to do that, and replace them every 5 years when they run out of write operations.

Winchester drives, on the other hand, use a time-honored complex system of delicate moving parts, and last virtually forever. They certainly do not start experiencing sudden failures if kept in continuous service for more than 5 years.

Comparisons a little unfair in places

[heffrey]

It seemed a little unfair that they only used the nice hardware RAID controller with the Intel SSDs. I would have liked to see them use it with all the other disks to get a more level playing field.

Re:Actually, that RAID card seems more interesting

[default luser]

Actually, I felt that the limiting factor was probably the craptastic single-core Pentium 4 EE they used to run all these benchmarks.

What, you shove thousands of dollars worth of I/O into a system, and run it through the paces with a CPU that sucked in 2005? I'm not surprised at all that most tests showed very little improvement with the RAID.