Intel SSD (X25-E & X-25M) RAID 0 Benchmarks

[SkOrPn]

One question to the storage experts out there, do you think going with a RAID card will signficantly improve performance? Also, do RAID cards behave properly with power management (in other words will my system be able to sleep and hibernate)?

I'm not sure about the power management thing, but I can say this for sure good quality PCIe RAID cards should use all available lanes that they were made for so in theory you should have 500 MB/s on each PCIe 2.0 lane, so if you get a x4 raid card would result in 2000MB/s throughput, and x8 4000MB/s theoretical throughput. NOW, after saying that the SATA II interface is still a maximum of 300MB/s theoretical throughput, so in order to take full advantage of all three drives you would need a PCIe RAID card of x4 minimum (since x1 does not provide enough throughtput for the bandwidth of 3 x SATA II connectors which is 900MB/s) and a processor on board capable of handling it. Now one last note, since both drives E and M seem to have a maximum of 215MB/s (on ICH anyway) read transfer you should be good to go with a high quality PCIe 2.0 x4 RAID card. Intel says that both E and M have a maximum of 250MB/s read, so I think a good dedicated raid card would provide you with about 105MB/s (above the ICH controller) of additional throughput with 3 M drives in raid 0. That is my best guess, but I'm no storage expert...

The question now? Is spending a few hundred more for a descent raid card worth an additional 100MB/s or so? There is also other benefits to having a dedicated RAID card, so my answer is YES it is worth it. lol