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A-Data speeds up SSDs
TAKING ADVANTAGE of the lower profile/power requirements of SSD drives, A-Data has come up with a nifty RAID enclosure for internal and external use called the XPG Dual SSD 3.5-inch RAID Enclosure.
The idea is to stick two 2.5-inch SSD units inside a 3.5-inch enclosure, creating an immediate RAID volume based on SSD that can be used with SATA and USB. The supported RAID modes (if you can call them that) include RAID 0, 1, JBOD, Span, SAFE33, SAFE50 and a RAID GUI.
The device also supports USB 2.0 connections, although we're thinking you'd have to be pretty desperate to spend a ton of money on a couple of SSD drives and end up walking around with them as USB drives. Especially when there are 500GB HDD units out there for a fraction of the price.
We can see the usage of this sort of solution in several scenarios, all very interesting, all very useful: a big-bucks-ultra-fast unit of SLC RAIDs or a cheap-yet-zippy MLC RAIDs with "budget" SSDs. It all comes down to pricing - the pricing of the XPG enclosure, of course.
RAID 0 should benefit the cheaper MLC drives the most, as it has the potential of doubling both read and write - so you can use a couple of $99 32GB drives and speed them up a whole lot, instead of spending $500+ on a single 64GB SLC drive. Remember RAID 1 offers not just mirroring, but also read performance as it can fetch the data from both drives.
A-Data is also selling the 3.5-inch enclosure as another unit, without the RAID capability, turning the drives into a JBOD unit. So don't get them mixed.
Considering Intel ICH and even some other third-party RAID providers had notable bugs when RAIDing together two or more SSD units, A-Data's proposal seems quite tempting. Enthusiasts will still need to wait until the end of Q1 2009 to get their hands on this, though. The RAID enclosure will sell at $59, while the non-RAID enclosure is expected to fetch $29... Sounds about right. µ
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Simply put, Brian, Victor is right.
RAID 1 can offer read performance gains, if OS is multi-threaded and supports split seeks, with a minor write performance penalty. With dedicated controllers it is possible to keep getting increased performance if you add more disks. Especially when using SSD drives because they do not suffer from HD initial seek penalty which may negate data transfer gains from reading from two or more disks at once.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
Have a good one!
Simply put Victor, you are a moron. Please read at least 1 article on RAID before you comment. RAID 1 offers absolutely no speed benefit of any kind, it only minorly slows down all hdd activity due to the raid controller having to access both drives to write or fetch data. The RAID controller doesnt pick one or the other to read from, it must read from both drives to do a parity check to ensure there is no data corruption. This parity check is what causes the minor slow-down when using RAID-1.
In any case, this RAID setup from A-Data is just a pathetic attempt to cover up the poorly designed controllers on their (and everyone elses except for Intels) MLC drives. After a new (and good) MLC controller comes out, these silly work-arounds will be obselete. Until then, dont buy a non-Intel MLC SSD unless you plan on putting it on a dedicated hardware RAID controller in RAID 0. If that is your goal, salud to you and happy transfer rates!
Windows doesn't support RAID on USB devices. Linux does, though.
@ssj4Gogeta
The most imprortant property of a SSD is access time and not transfer rate. Unless you use the SSD only to copy large files from an equally fast drive, you're not going to reach 200 or 300 MB/s often.
An SSD makes a big difference from a mechanical hard disk when doing thousands of small writes, it can be dozens of times faster.
@Rasem Brsiq
A RAID controller can **READ** sectors alternatively from two disks in RAID 1, so the read speed is greater than the write speed.
I'm curious, is there no longer editorial oversight at the Inquirer?
"Remember RAID 1 offers not just mirroring, but also read performance as it can fetch the data from both drives". Excuse me? Is this a new kind of RAID-1 that I was not previously aware of? Or is it another magical attribute of SSDs, such as the probability of failure of RAID-0 arrays constructed of SSDs not going up with the number of drives, which was mentioned in an earlier Inq article?
Please hire someone who knows tech to read the articles before they are posted, or fire the writers who don't know tech. Else I'll have to find a new homepage.
So the enclosure handles the RAID functionality itself? Does it have cache? I worry it'll have issues with random writes on MLC drives like the OCZ Core V2s.
This isn't intended for $700 Intel MLC drives so I don't think the SATA port limitation is an issue.
What I'd really like to see is 8 1.8" drives (Intel X18-Ms?) sideways on a backplane in a single 3.5" bay with two SAS-style 4ch connectors and a single power connection. It fits, even with 8mm 1.8 drives, you could probably squeeze 12 of the 5mm ones like the Intels if you tried.
Hook some of those up to a 24port Areca and you'll have a ridiculous amount of speed in only three standard bays.
if i recall correctly, Intel MLC SSD's already read at over 230 MB/s. and 2 of them in RAID 0 can read at around 400 MB/s. if this enclosure is going to use only one SATA port, won't it bottleneck the SSD's? (max SATA speed is 300 MB/s)