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Triple M.2 NVMe RAID-0 Testing Proves Latency Reductions

Posted by timothy on from the listen-to-your-intuition-luke dept.

Vigile writes: The gang over at PC Perspective just posted a story that looks at a set of three M.2 form factor Samsung 950 Pro NVMe PCIe SSDs in a RAID-0 array, courtesy of a new motherboard from Gigabyte that included three M.2 slots. The pure bandwidth available in this configuration is amazing, breaching 3.3 GB/s on reads and 3.0 GB/s on writes. But what is more interesting is a new testing methodology that allows for individual storage IO latency capturing, giving us a look at performance of SSDs in all configurations. What PC Perspective proved here is that users often claiming that RAIDs "feel faster" despite a lack of bandwidth result to prove it, are likely correct. Measurements now show that the latency of IO operations improves dramatically as you add drives to an array, giving a feeling of "snappiness" to a system beyond even what a single SSD can offer. PC Perspective's new testing demonstrates the triple RAID-0 array having just 1/6th of the latency of a single drive.

4 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. RAID 0 is not for anything you don't want to lose by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 3, Informative

    Remember kids, losing just one drive dumps the entire array. It's really not appropriate for anything besides completely transient data (scratch disks, stuff like this benchmark, etc.). Not smart to run your OS on RAID 0. RAID 10, OTOH . . . now we're talking.

  2. Re:This is retarded. by AllynM · · Score: 4, Informative

    The SSD controller already does a form of this, as it is talking to multiple flash memory dies over multiple channels. RAID is just another layer to get even more performance out of more parallelism (and as we figured out in testing, to considerably drop the latency under load).

    Allyn Malventano
    Storage Editor, PC Perspective

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    this sig was brought to you by the letter /.
  3. Re:Questionable Results by AllynM · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yup, we had a scale error as our Excel-fu was not as strong as we'd hoped when we made the custom format for the axis, and I totally fell for the error. I've updated the article with corrections.

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    this sig was brought to you by the letter /.
  4. Re:RAID 0 is not for anything you don't want to lo by sr180 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not completely true. With 6 or 8tb drives, you are looking at a few days to a week or so of the raid rebuilding. During this time, you have the protection of raid 0 without the speed.

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    In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!