[Brian]

Right now the storage market is starting to slowly shift away from SATA II interfaces, limited to 3.0Gbps, to the newer and faster SATA III connection which supports speeds twice that of SATA II. This is happening with both hard drives and SSDs alike, with the latter actually saturating SATA 3.0Gbps connections with the latest generation of drives on the market. As users look to increase performance and stay up to date, one question on some people’s mind is if they should cough up the cash for a newer and faster RAID card. In the first of two articles on the 8888ELP and 9260-8i MegaRAID cards from LSI, we look at how standard consumer drives interact with both interfaces in our real-world StorageMark 2010 traces.

Full Story

Part II Review

[spammeister]

Hopefully in PART 2 of the ongoing SSD saga (flair for the dramatic) you load those puppies up with SSD's in raid conflagurations.

Heh, 2 posts in 8+years, must be a record.

This post has been edited by spammeister: 17 January 2011 - 09:30 AM

[TSullivan]

Well maybe not for part two, but part three is easily in the works surrounding an array populated with SandForce-based SSDs

[Brian]

spammeister, on 17 January 2011 - 09:30 AM, said:

Hopefully in PART 2 of the ongoing SSD saga (flair for the dramatic) you load those puppies up with SSD's in raid conflagurations.

Heh, 2 posts in 8+years, must be a record.

2 posts in 8 years isn't bad. Welcome back and try to get another in before 2020.

As Thomas said, we do plan on a part three with a set of SSDs to show a small sampling of what can be done there. If you want to see more crazy SSD RAID implementations, here's a 19 drive array that has some impressive results.

http://forums.storag...ial-c300-128gb/

[vandy]

I've been a lurker on here since 2002.
Can't wait for Part 2 of this. I always enjoy reading the articles and reviews. Keep up the good work Brian.
I just purchased a Areca 1222 (with 8x Samsung F4EG) for my project server and now considering getting a LSI 9260-4i for my workstation. Going to wait for your article before pulling the trigger.

[Brian]

We're doing some work now with three Crucial F90s to give an idea on throughput of SSDs in RAID. We'll have at least two more parts of this review for you.

[DavidG]

One of the values of 6Gb technology is the ability to scale larger sets of SSD/HDD devices and not bottleneck the performance of the aggregated throughput. This is especially key in volumes up to 12 or more drives were the 9260 series starts to show the true benefit of 6Gb performance, depending on the drive type offering up to 3000+ MB/s in total throughput.

[MySchizoBuddy]

There doesn't seem to be any raid card for x16. Isn't there massive gains to be achieved by going the x16 route

[Kevin OBrien]

Really depends on how much bandwidth your array needs... that and many PCIe slots are only 8x electrical.