Kingston shows the speed benefits of RAIDed SSDs.

Kingston has been trying hard to convince the consumer that solid-state drives (SSDs) make sense as super-fast boot storage on PCs. Supplemented by, say, a 1.5TB mechanical drive, Kingston has been pushing low-capacity SSDs for a while. Trouble is, NAND pricing, which predicates around 90 per cent of the cost of a drive, has been increasing in price over the last year, thereby keeping an unfavourable value metric of over £2 per gigabyte. That means a 40GB drive still costs over £80.

But SSDs can also spit out blazingly-fast performance. To this end, Kingston ran us through a demonstration with a machine equipped with a total of six SSDs. The boot drives, composed of two 64GB V-series models, were set to RAID0 using the SATA controller on the motherboard. A further four V+ drives, 256GB in capacity each, were also in RAID0 but powered by PCIe-based Intel RAID controller.

Booting up in around 15 second once the POST sequence has been completed, the test involved opening up 50 applications and documents located on the boot drives. Taking just over 30 seconds and designed to highlight the sequential-speed nature of SSDs, the demonstration would take considerably longer on spindle-based storage.

The second test involved moving 41.6GB/s of data from one RAID array to the other. Completing the task in just over a minute and therefore averaging some 700MB/s, the speed is fantastically fast. Actually we're not sure how Kingston has pulled such speed considering the combined throughput of the boot drives, but there you are.

As we have mentioned before, the very cost of SSDs - now more expensive than ever - stops them from being adopted by the vast majority of users. The transfer-rate benefits are very obvious, though.

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So, in the words of that article, Kingston are trying to convince the consumer of the benefits by using a drive setup consisting of 6 SSDs costing something like £2300 to give about 1TB of storage, for which a conventional drive would cost about £60.

Isn't that rather like trying to convince someone that needs a Ford Ka of the benefits of Aston Martin? I mean a DB9 is great, and fast, and flashy and all, so come back when I can get one (new) for ten grand.

Lol - I didn't have to read this without knowing it would be a saracen anti-SSD post ;)

It was just demonstrating the performance at the extreme end with 6 drives,
as all the manufacturers are doing.

The 2 drive setup is more reasonable for a consumer at 280 eruo, as thats what many of us actually run.

Yes SSDs are more expensive than HDDs, bu then gfx cards are more expensive than onboard gfx….

Interesting, so they didn't bother doing a like-for-like test with RAIDed HDDs?

I'm not anti-SSD.

All I've said elsewhere, and it wasn't the point in this thread, was that personally I don't consider them good value for money, and not worth what you currently have to pay … or not for general purpose desktop PCs anyway. Lots of people rave about them, and those reading threads here deserve to know that not everyone agrees.

Are they fast? Yes. Are they fast enough to justify the cost? That's a personal decision, and for me, the answer is a very clear no. But for those that buy and a happy with the performance they get and the price they paid, that's fine too.

It is not, however, a no-brainer as some people like to suggest. It's a case of assessing what performance you'll get and deciding if you're prepared to pay that for it. If you are, fine. I'm not.

The point here was that trying to convince consumers of SSD performance using a £2300 array is plain daft.

Don't you lose the TRIM function if you have a RAID0 set-up?

Kingston shows the speed benefits of RAIDed SSDs.

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