After a lot of blood, sweat, tears, coffee and late nights, we have finally come up with some interesting findings regarding the infamous Solid State Drives!!! Obviously one of our favourite toys here at Vadim, we were almost reduced to fisticuffs fighting over who got the chance to put these babies through their paces in a series of Raid tests....so I’ll start by giving a brief overview about what they are, how they work and what’s so good about them!

Firstly down to basics (just for the newbies); Solid State Drives are an alternative to Hard Disk Drives, essentially like flash drives and akin to USB sticks of your camera/phones Secure Data Cards. They are silent with no moving parts thus generating no heat, but unlike their aforementioned relatives, use SRAM or DRAM instead of Flash Memory so access time and latency is significantly reduced.

This of course leads to some serious advantages over traditional HDD’s:

• Faster Access; as there is no mechanical element to the drives, access can commence straight away
• Significantly higher read and write speeds (average write - 100Mb, read – 80Mb per second)
• Silent, no moving parts that can break, leading to higher tolerance to shock & vibration.
• No heat emissions to rise ambient temperature inside your system case
• Lower power consumption
• File fragmentation has less impact as seek time is constant throughout the entire drive

AWESOME I hear you say....damn straight!! Ok, it’s not all rainbows and bumblebees...they’re not available in large capacities yet, as with HDD’s it’s generally not recommended to inflict magnetic fields or static discharge (but a bit more so with SSD’s!)....and they’re REALLY expensive... until now! We have in stock the new 32Gb Samsung SSD’s which have been reworked and re-priced so now you can own your very own SSD for as little as £300....or buy loads and put them in a RAID array, which is exactly where I am going with this article!
We thought it would be loads of fun to get as many as we can together and build an array and see if the write speeds multiply effectively with the more drives that are inserted into the array...hopefully reaching a supersonic 1 Gigabyte PER SECOND!!! To quote two very wise Pop Culture Icons, Maverick and Goose.....”I feel the need...the need for SPEED!!!"

Now i'm sure you'd all like to see what these drives look like, so we thought you'd love to see what 25 of them look like!

Right then, on with the tests...starting from the ground up, we built a test bench with the following components;

• P5E3 Premium Asus Motherboard
• Intel Qx9770
• 4gb OCZ DDR3 1600
• BFG 9800GX2
• Coolermaster 1000w
• Coolermaster Hyper TX2
• Sony IDE Optical drive & Floppy Drive
(ok, maybe overkill for this...but I managed to convince everyone I had to use the very best on the market to properly run this benchmark!!! ;p)

Next we did a basic Operating System test which revealed that XP32bit still has the edge over Vista...fairly obvious...but we like to cover ALL bases here at Vadim! Then I tried out the best HD benchmarking tests to see which ones could actually handle the awesome power and speed that we were trying to accomplish with this article. They included:

• HD Tune
• Performance Test from Passmark
• Datamark
• Crystal Disk Mark
• HD Tach
• SiSoft Sandra lite

We did indeed get some good marks with most, but we found Crystal Disk Mark gave the most consistent results across the various platforms, but it was within HD Tach that the real answer was uncovered. So we found out which OS to use, built a system to use it on and decided which tests to run, the next problem that we faced was how to build an array with enough disks to break to 1Gb barrier. The P5E3 Premium only has 6 onboard Sata ports, and although we tried a 6x32Gb SSD RAID0 array, it was never going to be enough to reach 1Gb...no, we need more...much more....maybe 10 or 12 or....(hehehe!)...16 SSD’s!!! Obviously we would need a dedicated RAID card if we were really going to break the 1gb p/s barrier, but which to go for? After a little research, we opted to try out the various offerings from the range of Adaptec and Areca RAID Cards; The 2, 4 and 8 port model Adapted cards and the 8 and 16 port Areca cards.

Now onto the results:

Here are the actual screenshots from the 16 card Raid 0 test results:

and the 16 card Raid 60 test results:

After a lot of frustrating scores, puzzled looks and head scratching, it took a message to Areca to update the firmware to give the ability for the new hardware we were using. As soon as it came through we were flying though!
As you can see from these rather beautifully constructed graphs and results...although we managed to break the 1Gb barrier it was only with the burst speed (The burst speed is the speed that data can be accessed from the drive's on-board read-ahead memory. This measures the speed of the drive and controller interface)...The Average Read Speed is a more noticeable result as it tests from all sectors of the drive/array in a way that would be used in real life circumstances. We also tried 16 drives in Raid 60, just to see if we could break the 1gb barrier whilst still retaining some kind of collateral in case of a data loss and lo and behold we did it!
Alas, due to the RAID cards only using a PCIex8 slot, it significantly bottle-necks the ability to reach anything further than around 900Mb per second Read speed. I’m sure that with enough drives, we can achieve supersonic, lightspeed or even Ludicrous Speed (for those that know Spaceballs!!) but a quick note to Adaptec and Areca...please, please, please construct a card that uses the whole PCIex16 slot.... WE WANT TO GO FASTER!!!!