Date:
Monday , July 06, 2009
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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SSD RAID scaling under Windows 7

What can you expect when you get your new Windows 7 install working with those crisp new solid state hard drives? SSD drives are not what they used to be already. And just how is that Intel ICH10R chipset serving you?

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Intel ICH10R Performance

Since we are not reviewing the SSDs used here we are not terribly concerned with the actual performance of the drives. Rather, we are looking at what sort of scaling we get under Windows 7 and the Intel ICH10R chipset. Since many of today’s SSDs are able to match the performance of the Corsair P256 SSD it makes sense then to find at what point do we hit a wall.

We are going to use the popular ATTO benchmark to show us the theoretical bandwidth of our setup and this serves as a best case scenario. To bring things down to earth we will also test for Windows startup time. Time will be measured from the moment Windows begin loading until we see our desktop. This removes the additional overhead of the BIOS as well as the extra fifteen seconds added when running a dedicated RAID card.

First up we test the Intel ICH10R Southbridge. We run our test three times and take the average of the scores.

For those interested, we used a 128 KB stripe size and aligned our SSDs with a 128 KB offset.

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Right off the bat we notice a couple of important points. The biggest is that we have almost perfect scaling with respect to our READ scores up to three drives configured in RAID-0. We then hit the limit of the ICH10R bandwidth. This is important because the smaller and arguably more popular 30GB SSDs will be able to hit this point very easily. If you plan on buying four 30 GB SSDs and running them in RAID-0 the only benefit over three drives will be the increased capacity and the higher risk for data loss should one of the drives fail.

The other point which is slightly less noticeable but just as important is that until you get to data sizes above 4 KB there is no difference between running two drives in RAID-0 and four drives. This may not pertain to many of you but for those interested in running certain server configurations it makes sense then to buy two larger drives than three or more smaller ones.

Lastly, the anomaly at the 16 KB file size was fully repeatable and despite every effort on my part the benchmark continuously showed a drop in performance when running two or three drives.

Let’s see how our write speeds hold up under the same conditions.

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The write speeds of our drives are much smoother and thankfully without any odd spikes. The scaling is very similar to the write speeds and as we hit that 600 MB/s mark we see almost perfect scaling. More proof that when using the x58 chipset you should plan out how many drives you really want to cram in your system.

We also see the same behavior with data sizes smaller than 8KB. The difference is a bit more pronounced with our write speeds but if you deal with a lot of data that is under 4 KB than a two drive setup would be the most economical.

Now let’s install our RAID card and see what $450 (Card + Cables) gets us.