News - Kingston shows the speed benefits of RAIDed SSDs.

[HEXUS]

A two-drive boot setup and four-drive storage space equates to blistering performance.

Read more.

[Saracen]

So, in the words of that article, Kingston are trying to convince the consumer of the benefits by using a drive setup consisting of 6 SSDs costing something like £2300 to give about 1TB of storage, for which a conventional drive would cost about £60.

Isn't that rather like trying to convince someone that needs a Ford Ka of the benefits of Aston Martin? I mean a DB9 is great, and fast, and flashy and all, so come back when I can get one (new) for ten grand.

[mikerr]

Lol - I didn't have to read this without knowing it would be a saracen anti-SSD post

It was just demonstrating the performance at the extreme end with 6 drives,
as all the manufacturers are doing.

The 2 drive setup is more reasonable for a consumer at 280 eruo, as thats what many of us actually run.

Yes SSDs are more expensive than HDDs, bu then gfx cards are more expensive than onboard gfx....

[shaithis]

Interesting, so they didn't bother doing a like-for-like test with RAIDed HDDs?

[Saracen]

I'm not anti-SSD.

All I've said elsewhere, and it wasn't the point in this thread, was that personally I don't consider them good value for money, and not worth what you currently have to pay ... or not for general purpose desktop PCs anyway. Lots of people rave about them, and those reading threads here deserve to know that not everyone agrees.

Are they fast? Yes. Are they fast enough to justify the cost? That's a personal decision, and for me, the answer is a very clear no. But for those that buy and a happy with the performance they get and the price they paid, that's fine too.

It is not, however, a no-brainer as some people like to suggest. It's a case of assessing what performance you'll get and deciding if you're prepared to pay that for it. If you are, fine. I'm not.

The point here was that trying to convince consumers of SSD performance using a £2300 array is plain daft.

[Mark@SCAN]

Don't you lose the TRIM function if you have a RAID0 set-up?

[[GSV]Trig]

Don't you lose the TRIM function if you have a RAID0 set-up?

Depends what drives, my OCZ ones now have TRIM/GC in RAID as well as single drive configurations due to the new 1.5fw

[GaryRW]

Don't you lose the TRIM function if you have a RAID0 set-up?

That was my understanding but if GSV Trig is right, things have moved on . Actually, re-reading your post, are you sure it's trim? I know quite a few have done garbage collection by themselves even when in RAID - are you saying that OCZ have gone further and got trim working even in RAID? I understood it was only MS storage drivers that enabled trim. Would be very happy to be corrected though!

[TooNice]

I doubt this is really news to anyone (not saying it shouldn't be reported, just that I am not sure what Kingston expect to get out of it). I think everyone who knows and care enough about system performance to care about SSD already knows that a good SSD is -really- fast especially in some applications. And I do not think anyone would not want one, if only to play with it. But it is just plain too expensive for many.

A mechanical drive costs 6-8p per GB. That's around 30x cheaper per GB than SSD. Is the SSD 30x faster? Definitely not in all aspect, but lets say it is in 4k random write (very important) it is still hard to justify for most people. And that won't change even if 4k random write is 60x faster.

It's not a case of just 'more expensive', but it's a matter of more expensive by how much. I reckon that GFX card that is 30x as fast as the HD5870, yet costs 15x as much would still be hard sell. If the card is guaranteed to be performance leading for a number of years, then maybe quite a few people will be willing to take loan/credit card, but in the case of SSD, you are fairly guaranteed that nothing in the market today will be performance leading for a few years.

[leexgx]

TRIM currently only works with AHCI basic windows drivers or the new marvel SATA card with the updated drivers (not sure witch one) GC may still work under RAID 0 (thought it needed NTFS for it to work)

Any RAID drivers currently does not support TRIM command yet, so your 2-3x RAID 0 setup could end up slower then an single SSD on Writes that is, Reads would still be very fast thought as long as Writes are quite low

SSD + RAID is really just an Benchmarks for most, unless you really need 400-700MB/s of data rate for messing with big files, just Buy the SSD Size you need that supports TRIM
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=736

Indilinx SSD based (M225), second gen or intel G2 based (updated firmware for them all),
maybe samsung seocnd gen SSDs that support TRIM firmware upgrade
Intel, Sandforce, Micron, Toshiba, Indilinx

maybe Toshiba (TRIM supported as Default) but not proven yet

not sure about JMicron even with the new 612-618 (seems to suffer from 0.02MB/s writeing issues still) or the Sandforce or Micron based SSDs as they are not proven (C300 can be killed in an short time)