Intel X25-V in RAID-0: Faster than X25-M G2 for $250?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 29, 2010 8:59 PM ESTFinal Words
While I can't say that I like the idea of giving up TRIM support, the performance you get out of a pair of X25-Vs in RAID 0 is impressive. You effectively get next-generation controller performance out of a tweaked version of a 2 year old SSD. The lack of TRIM does bother me, but I personally use an X25-M G2 under OS X without TRIM and the drive is resilient enough (most of the time) to not make me feel any performance degradation.
Given the price point and the well behaved nature of these drives, I'd say it's definitely worth your consideration. If you like the simplicity of a single drive setup or want to hang on to TRIM support (perhaps if you do know your workload is more random than normal), by all means go for a single G2 or one of the SandForce offerings. However, if you're fine dealing with a potentially more complex setup (if one of your X25-Vs dies, you lose all your data) and don't mind giving up TRIM, this is a great option. The X25-V RAID 0 route gives you all of the Intel SSD safety net while posting some very competitive numbers. At $250 it may be the best overall performance you get out of an SSD at this price point until Intel's 3rd generation drives ship in Q4.
It's high performance on a budget, not without its tradeoffs, but in this case they may be livable.
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morphin1 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
Thank you a lot Anand for the reply and clearing that up for me.The Sony Vaio Z has samsung MMCRE28G drives(2*64GB).
I am holding my buying decision on your recomendation. What say you? Will the above drives be rendered useless overtime with Trim?
Thanks you a lot for your time.
I have been reading AT for over 2years now and love the indepth reviews you guys do as opposed to other sites.
Love this site.
Cheers
morphin1 - Saturday, April 3, 2010 - link
How will the samsung drive fare without TRIM.I wrote incorrectly when i said With TRIM.
Chloiber - Sunday, April 4, 2010 - link
What's the QD of the random read/write tests (did I miss it?)?AnalyticalGuy3 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Suppose I have four X25V's in RAID 0 using the Intel ICH10. Two questions:
1) Just to confirm my understanding, a random read request smaller than the stripe size should only access one member of the array, correct?
2) Suppose the queue contains four random read requests smaller than the stripe size. And suppose I'm really lucky -- each random read request happens to tap a different member of the array. Is the ICH10 smart enough to dispatch all four random read requests in parallel?
boostcraver - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - link
Anand,I'm sure I read this article thoroughly but I didn't see exactly what the RAID configuration was - whether onboard raid, dynamic disks in Windows, or a dedicated RAID add-in card.
Once that is explained, it'd be great if we could get a benchmark comparison of these different RAID technologies. Something to justify the simplicity of using Windows dynamic disks for raid0 / raid1 configuration, or to spend the extra bucks on a SAS/SATA raid card. Since everyone has been supporting RAID0 for the best performance, we should understand exactly the options at hand.
Thanks for the great articles.
- boostcraver
Shin0chan - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
"A standard 80GB X25-M wouldn't be this bad off, the X25-V gets extra penalized by having such a limited capacity to begin with. You can see that the drive is attempting to write at full speed but gets brought down to nearly 0MB/s as it has to constantly clean dirty blocks. Constant TRIMing would never let the drive get into this state. It's worth mentioning that a desktop usage pattern shouldn't get this happen either. Another set of sequential writes will clean up most of this though"Hi guys, I understood where this topic was going until I read the last sentence of this paragraph and this lost me. I'm trying to understand this from a normal day-to-day usage train of thought; the performance degradation is mind blowing.
So how would I do a bunch of sequential writes to the drive if my OS and Apps would be sitting on this? (They normally take up about 60-65GB for me.) From my understanding, this means I would have to use Secure Erase and restore from say a complete backup.
Please enlighten me lol. Thanks.
chaosfox97 - Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - link
If it got over loaded and you were regretting putting it into RAID-0, couldn't you just change it to normal, use TRIM, and change it back to RAID-0?