[HappyHacking]

I havent uses those Intel X25-M yet, they aré still in their boxes, but since i have seen the performance for the crucial realssd c300, i cant keep them out of my head, since i cannot upgrade my computer too soon, i should get the best hardware available at the moment, this crucial drives aré still unreleased, but im sure i will get them early march. Why do you thinks i should keep my X25-M drives as primary ssds for my raid 0 array??? And well imo X25-E drives are too expensive.

[DetlevCM]

HappyHacking, on 12 February 2010 - 07:15 AM, said:

I havent uses those Intel X25-M yet, they aré still in their boxes, but since i have seen the performance for the crucial realssd c300, i cant keep them out of my head, since i cannot upgrade my computer too soon, i should get the best hardware available at the moment, this crucial drives aré still unreleased, but im sure i will get them early march. Why do you thinks i should keep my X25-M drives as primary ssds for my raid 0 array??? And well imo X25-E drives are too expensive.

Because Intels don't fail out of nowhere as some other's have done (don't think crucial though).

Intel drives don't show the extreme degradation of performance that some other drives show.

Intel drives are very good a parallel reads/writes - Queue depth - Q32 4K Random Read/Write test and you get 150MB/s read and 70-80 odd MB/s write for a single one! Intel is pretty good here

And else - well, random performance in general - that's their strong point.

[HappyHacking]

Well that are good points, i agree with most, but i think the lack of 6Gb/s, and the fastest read speed of the crucial ones, will deliver the best user experience, perhaps those strong points on the Intel drives are something to care, but with 8 drives in raid array i dont think they will be relevant (i hope im not wrong) since they will be almost multiplied by 8. I will bench both arrays when i have those new crucial and i will publish the results.
Btw i think this new crucial got a Grabage Collection function that activates when drive is IDLE and its OS or FS independent (Mac OS users should get one), so since we cant use TRIM (its supported on crucial drives) over a raid array of drives, this will save the day.

As a note, i know that the NAND used on Crucial drives is build on a Micron-Intel fab where the X25-M G2 NAND where produced, so this is perhaps the next steep on ssd performance.

[DetlevCM]

HappyHacking, on 12 February 2010 - 03:28 PM, said:

Well that are good points, i agree with most, but i think the lack of 6Gb/s, and the fastest read speed of the crucial ones, will deliver the best user experience, perhaps those strong points on the Intel drives are something to care, but with 8 drives in raid array i dont think they will be relevant (i hope im not wrong) since they will be almost multiplied by 8. I will bench both arrays when i have those new crucial and i will publish the results.
Btw i think this new crucial got a Grabage Collection function that activates when drive is IDLE and its OS or FS independent (Mac OS users should get one), so since we cant use TRIM (its supported on crucial drives) over a raid array of drives, this will save the day.

As a note, i know that the NAND used on Crucial drives is build on a Micron-Intel fab where the X25-M G2 NAND where produced, so this is perhaps the next steep on ssd performance.

Do some tests by all means
CrystalDisk mark is good - as is AS SSD test or whatever its called.

Make sure you have the queued writes too.

It will be interesting to see - the snappiness feel - that's so subjective, I wouldn't trust it - honestly.
I can switch drivers any way I like on my laptop and it suddenly feels snappier? No matter if I go to slower or quicker drivers...

Trust the benchmarks and potentially timing application launches or Boot times.

[Spod]

I should really do my homework before posting this, but since I don't have time right now (sorry), I'll mention it anyway.
I seem to recall that TRIM doesn't work on drives in a RAID array. Is that true?
If so, the more elegant handling (i.e. reduced degradation) of performance when the whole drive has been written with data might make Intel the better choice in the long run. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but it's worth checking out before you commit.

[HappyHacking]

Spod, on 17 February 2010 - 06:35 AM, said:

I should really do my homework before posting this, but since I don't have time right now (sorry), I'll mention it anyway.
I seem to recall that TRIM doesn't work on drives in a RAID array. Is that true?
If so, the more elegant handling (i.e. reduced degradation) of performance when the whole drive has been written with data might make Intel the better choice in the long run. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but it's worth checking out before you commit.

ATM TRIM isnt supported on any raid array AAFAIK, but some drives like the Crucial RealSSD C300 support a "Garbage Collection" feature, that remains independent of the OS, FS, and work when drive is idle, TRIM is a better option, but with the performance of several ssd drives on dedicated hardware array i think this doenst matters.

[rkagerer]

Hi HappyHacker,

Sorry to resurrect an old thread.. just wondering, how did your array of C300's work out? What are read latency / random read access times like? And how have the C300's performance held up over time; any degradation of the array performance?

I'm thinking of doing something similar, but with redundancy (RAID10 or RAID5).

[Brian]

Welcome to the forums rk. Before you jump on the C300, be advised there is an issue that requires a firmware fix.

http://forums.storag...l-c300-failure/

[rkagerer]

Brian, on 15 April 2010 - 09:30 AM, said:

Welcome to the forums rk. Before you jump on the C300, be advised there is an issue that requires a firmware fix.

http://forums.storag...l-c300-failure/

Thanks Brian! Actually I did contact Crucial to ask about when their next FW is arriving and whether it will fix this issue:
http://www.anandtech...ate-on-my-drive

Response was basically cookie cutter ambiguity. Given the choice between 8x Intel 160gb x-25m g2's vs 8 crucial c300's what would you go with?

Sorry for typos, doing this from mobile.
Response was basically cookie cut ambiguity.

Given the choice between 8x X-25M 160gb G2's or 8 C300's what would you go with?

-Rk (sorry for typos, doing this from mobile)

[Brian]

Why don't you start a new thread with your needs, budget and other considerations, Such a conversation will get lost in this thread.