Introducing DuckieHo, Intel SSD Communities' first Moderator!

[idata]

Everyone,

I wanted to take a quick second to introduce our communities site (and Intel's first ever!) moderator, DuckieHo. He's a well-seasoned SSD expert and is here to help answer your solid-state storage related questions. DuckieHo will be meeting periodically with myself and Intel engineers to make sure he's got the best possible information and that users' concerns will be heard. If you've got any questions/concerns, please voice them here, but if not, come say what's up to DuckieHo!

-Scott, Intel Corporation

[RGiff]

So what you are saying , if I understanding you correctly . If I wanted to set up a computer with two SSD in RAID 0 , I would have to use Western Digital Because they use Advanced Wear - Leveling , with a combination of dynamic and static wear - leveling algorithms. So the drives don't degrade in a RAID enviroment. My Next question is when is Intel going to solve this problem. Because there alot of us that would like to be able to RAID or Intel SSDs??

[idata]

The "only" real performance benefits of Raid 0 is higher sequential throughput and scaling at higher queue depths. This type of performance improvement capability is not much use for normal desktop users and raid 0 can actually reduce performance where it matters for most desktop users – latency.

Enterprise use is another issue.

Having used hard and hybrid raid 0 (2x X25-E) for some time for desktop use I saw no noticeable performance decrease when I switched to a single drive (X25-M). Boot up was quicker because the raid rom did not have to load, but even if you took that out the equation there was no difference. The reason I saw no noticeable drop in performance was because (with my usage patterns) I was not able to utilise the performance that was available.

4K random read/ write IOP performance for a single SSD is already way above what most people will ever need. Saturating SATA II speeds is hard to do without placing a high load on the rest of the system. (i.e. the flood of data from a saturated SATA II has to typically be processed at some stage, so something other than the storage system is likely to become a bottleneck when that happens).

My 2 cents anyway. If you can use the performance in raid 0, great, but if not it's just not worth it.

For the reasons above my hope for the G3 drives is lower latency, something that has not yet been revealed. Oh, the suspense.

BTW, if you don't write excessively you will not see much degradation with Intel drives in raid 0. People I know that use raid 0 in a desktop environment tend to run a secure erase every 6 months or so and restore the data afterwards from an image. Not idea but no big deal either to get optimum performance back.

You could also run a pure software raid 0 if you wanted TRIM to work. Users on other forums have reported that it works but I haven't tried it myself yet.

[idata]

redux has pretty much covered the primary points of why RAID0 does not benefit desktop work patterns.

Robert, all modern SSDs employ wear-leveling. If you want SSDs in RAID and maintain long-term write performance, you need a SSD that performs garbage collection. However, like redux mentioned, Intel SSDs are very resilient to dirty pages and most users won't see noticable write performance degradation even after months of use.

[idata]

When we meet intel g3 in supermarkets?