Opinions on Vertex 4 - and stripe size for SSDs

[virtualrain]

Couple of questions... Newegg has a great deal on Vertex 4 256GB drives these days... what's the consensus on them? I'm considering a couple in RAID0 for my active photo library.

Also, what's the consensus on the best stripe size for RAID0 arrays of SSD's for large image file sizes (25MB per image). Does stripe size impact performance in any appreciable way? Write amplification?

Thanks!

[virtualrain]

Ever get the feeling your invisible? :yepp:

After reading several reviews, it seems like few really understand this drives performance mode. It seems like a great concept... use the NAND in an SLC type mode until it's all been written and then consolidate the writes into double-bit per cell storage and repeat using increasingly smaller chunks of free space. Resulting in better than typical write performance in a lot of cases.

As for RAID0 stripe size, I'm guessing the best stripe size is still 128K or so to minimize write amplification and optimize performance for large files.

Any other thoughts?

[joelz]

I like the vertex 3's (own 9 of them) and have yet to see more impressive benchmarks with the Vertex 4. That doesn't mean they don't exist, its just that when the v4 came out the performance was not as good as v3's. That is likely fixed now with a fw update? Its something I need to validate. The whole point being a v3 may cost less and provide the mind boggling speed..

In regards to stripe size, experiment by benching with 64k and the largest the RAID controller supports where the bench tests are your file operations. Another option is to use a benchmark tool, but only focus on transfers at the size you are targeting. Atto would be good for that.

In the case of IOP measurements, sqlio is an easy one to use and IOMeter is another great tool to use to compare what stripe size is going to give your system the best performance based on your unique usage.