RAID0 & The SSD – Conclusions and Intel RST Ver 10 Released

CONCLUSIONS

EASE OF INSTALLATION AND PERFORMANCE

The two things that can truly be said about experimenting with RAID0 this past weekend are that it is quick and easy and the performance boost that you see in the typical desktop is absolutely amazing. The only reason that we spent so many hours experimenting was to fine tune and show you how different options would benefit your build and also because we were curious how RAID would work with the different configuration of SSDs.  One can create a RAID0 environment in 20 minutes or so when you throw in the quick OS installation as well.

PROVEN TRICKS TO BOOST PERFORMANCE

The optimization method that was key to our final test results was when we jumped into our drive policies and turned off write cache buffer flushing.  This improved all but the 512kb transfer speed results but the single most amazing jump seen here was our 4kb random write scores moving from 54MB/s to 280 MB/s which we never would have imagined prior to testing.  This specific transfer method is one of the most important to the user as it accounts for over 55% of disk activity in typical consumer usage and is the transfer method that shows the most visible improvement in a system.

INTEL RST 10 HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED

In order to demonstrate how the RST version alone will improve your performance, we jumped the gun a bit and compared the latest RST release (9.6) to that of an, as of yet, unreleased version.  The SSD Review IN NO WAY recommends the use of drivers which are not publicly available and approved so we are happy to announce that the new RST package that we tested (10) is now available for download from Intel here! Now isn’t that a coincidence?  Remember to download the correct version please as nobody wants to experience the heartache of the effect of installing the wrong software.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT OUR TEST SYSTEM?

RAID has now been incorporated into our Test Bench and we will continue to test different RAID configurations and hardware.  As a matter of fact, we have just confirmed with LSI that their MegaRAID SAS-SATA 9260-8i is on its way and we think we have gotten Crucial to lend us a few more SSDs for the tests.  Can you imagine the blistering speeds we will see in RAIDING 8xCrucial 256GB C300 SSDs through this RAID card in SATA 6GB/s mode?  This is going to be incredible so stay tuned!

THANKS AGAIN TO CRUCIAL

As we establish ourselves with manufacturers, the art of obtaining samples for review gets a bit simpler however it is a task for manufacturers to justify sending subsequent samples to the same reviewer, especially since only a certain percentage of drives are designated for allocation.

We have to give Kelly Sasso and Crucial  credit, not only for establishing themselves as the pioneer of SATA 6Gb/s technology at the consumer level, but also for enabling our tests through loan of there SATA 3 SSDs to show our readers just what the SSD is capable of.

Pg1 – Introduction & Test Protocol

Pg2 – TRIM and Building RAID0

Pg3 – Optimization and RealSSDx4

Pg4 – Benchmarking in RealSSDx2

Pg5 – Conclusions and Intel New RST Ver 10 Released

DISCUSS THE REVIEW HERE!