Reliability of Revo, Ibis and other AIO Raid 0 SSD's

Greetings all. Anybody have any insight as to the reliability of recent SSD based products that are providing out-of-the-box raid solutions, e.g. the Revodrive and Ibis drives by OCZ?

I know personally that I would not consider a hard disk based R0 as my system disk (i.e. OS, apps and documents) for my primary computer, even with a comprehensive daily backup because of the risk of system failure. However, with these out of the box raid 0 SSD solutions it doesn't seem like this is as much a consideration- at least not one that is being talked about- and I was curious if that's because SSD is that much more reliable in a raid 0 solution. Maybe I'm reading between the lines on this, but I never recall seeing a 4 drive hard disk R0 out of the box solution like we are with the upcoming Revodrive update.

Thanks for your thoughts.
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Chris

The problem with hard drives is that a failure of any drive, in any way, would cause data loss - how big of a loss is a matter of coincidence.
With SSDs, what we have seen so far has not been a failure of NAND, but rather of the controllers (we've seen entire SSDs become unusable, in different forms). So far I have had 2 X25-Es out of 4 fail in the same manner - one UNREDABLE sector (which is quite odd for NAND!), and have seen a few other X25-M failures similar to it :(

The data should be retrievable, however, the cost would probably be higher than the drive is worth.

RAID0 itself is not an issue with SSDs, the controllers themselves... I am not too confident yet :( (I have 3 different SSD types at the moment, and I ran most high-end SSDs for testing at least - X25-E/M and C300 are used ATM).

The only difference with these products is that the raid chip is on the card rather than the mobo. The Revo Drive/ IBIS drive use Silicon Image raid chips. SiI3124 & 3124.

In that context you are not decreasing your risk you are increasing it because it then goes to a PCIe interface.

You can’t TRIM the drives and I don’t think it is possible to update the firmware unless you send the drive back to the manufacturer. There is no built in power backup facility and the power back up capacitor used on the more expensive SF1500 drives has been omitted.

The design of these products suggests only one thing. They are for the enthusiast that does not mind rebuilding his array when it fails.

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Originally Posted by Ao1

The design of these products suggests only one thing. They are for the enthusiast that does not mind rebuilding his array when it fails.

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That's what I suspected. Enterprise level performance at enthusiast level tolerance for failure. Thanks for the responses!

get a good image program and do frequent images, makes reinstallation a snap! however, i wouldnt mess with them newfangled pre-raided pci-e cards tbh. at least not for a few more generations, at which point they probably wont exist anyway. they are dead-end tech.

I have a Revo 120gb, only had it for a week and besides incompatibilities that prevent me from finishing a windows 7 install it works fine. Win7 installation will find the card, install the main files, restart and continue then go to a black screen never to return. This is what my stupid extreme3 does atleast. Most people seem to be able to install once windows finds it and gets the drivers. I'm just using it for games until something improves, but I'm not hurting with my old agility 120gb. Laughing btw because people seem to be forgetting that raid kinda started and was perfected on pci, I think pcie can handle it just fine. If anything happens its the chips, firmware or the motherboards bios.

Also, want to shout this out to anyone thinking of purchasing a PCIe based SSD. Always put it in the topmost pcie slot above your graphics card, allot of motherboard makers are too lazy to be bothered with proper expansion card support and thusly its nearly impossible to boot off pcie storage. Putting these cards in the topmost slot seems to keep it from being ignored or have corruption issues.

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Originally Posted by Dainas

Also, want to shout this out to anyone thinking of purchasing a PCIe based SSD. Always put it in the topmost pcie slot above your graphics card, allot of motherboard makers are too lazy to be bothered with proper expansion card support and thusly its nearly impossible to boot off pcie storage. Putting these cards in the topmost slot seems to keep it from being ignored or have corruption issues.

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Why should it matter what slot it is in? It should be able to be booted from no matter what slot it is in.

I've had my ioXtreme in damn near every slot and it works great. However it can't be booted from :p:

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Originally Posted by lowfat

Why should it matter what slot it is in? It should be able to be booted from no matter what slot it is in.

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Unfortunately, mobo makers f*** up the BIOS and storage controllers do not work in every PCI-e slot :( It plain s***s.

I agree somewhat with CT, and forgot to mention that..
A PCI-e based SSD is nice if you KNOW exactly what you need it for and will use it for nothing else.
A simple 2.5" SSD might not offer the same performance, however you can swap it between computers in seconds, use it instantly as external storage, AND most importantly use it in a laptop!

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Laughing btw because people seem to be forgetting that raid kinda started and was perfected on pci, I think pcie can handle it just fine

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The problem is not PCI-e. i use pci-e for storage more than your average joe, and swear by it!
the problem is the implementation by the manufacturer. it is flaky at best with this device. you have listed a few of the many limitations of the device yourself. it not having a bios and having settings, etc, are limiting factors. only has two stripe sizes, correct? that is a limiting factor in itself, no bios, no cache, no alot of things. it is a lot to sacrifice a pci-e slot for so little. and to raid two devices? unthinkable to lose such connectivity in your system for such little gain, no flexibility. what about multiple raid sets, different types of raid? its a nice little gimmick of course, but its just that imo. just my .02c

Most people who have the revo drive are like me. We have lots of drives and are already in the habit of backing up files. Considering what we paid for SSD up until recently I consider the $350 I paid to be a bargain. Besides I have an X58 and am done with sli and crossfire for this lifetime.