Posted 11 August 2012 - 12:25
The thing that makes SSD's so fast is their IOPS or Input/Output Operations Per Second. It's not really the bandwidth that makes it feel fast. By putting SSD's in raid you're actually increasing the latency and lowering the IOPs to get increased bandwidth.
Raiding SSD's thus benefits large file read/writes like video editing, content creation in general, normal large file transfers. But it can reduce performance for things like booting and small file transfers. At worst you'll see a performance deficit and at best the performance will remain the same.
I did a lot of testing on this recently by trying a single SSD then RAID0 with two identical SSD's then RAID0 with three identical SSD's - Each time I added an extra drive to the RAID group the latency went up and IOPS went down. Of course throughput went up but how often are you transferring very large files and how often is 470MB/ps write not enough?
In my opinion keep your SSD's unraided, all my own testing says there's no benefit beyond throughput and many tasks including booting actually took longer and depending on the RAID card you have you may even get an extra boot screen to sit through that can double, triple or quadruple boot times.
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