I was just curious what it would look like once I removed the metal shroud. It’s very similar to the Samsung 128GB drive, but it’s kinda interesting to note that this MLC X25-M 80GB drive uses 20 4GB chips to achieve its capacity, rather than 8 16GB flash chips.

Also of note is the big Intel controller that is at least partially responsible for the terrific write speeds of this model. Expect a tech tips that covers a little bit about Intel’s mainstream series SSD as well as RAID performance!

Now I’ve added an Areca RAID card to the mix. This is starting to look like a worse and worse investment all the time. I wanted to try with a few different cards because I figured “Hey, now I’ve got an Areca, so it’ll just be a matter of 3 different products that function properly, but have varying levels of performance”.

WRONG!

Card #1 (ARC-1210) makes my POST & BIOS screens refuse to show. Windows boots fine, and from there I can configure RAID sets, but that’s not something I can accept as a 24/7 solution.

Card #2 (ARC-1222) boots fine in the machine, allows me to create a RAID set out of the four X25-M drives, gives great read performance, but then takes a big dump on the write performance (far worse than onboard), wavering up and down between about 225MB/s and 50MB/s (no consistency to it)

Card #3 (ARC-1680ix-8) failed to boot several times and simply hung at the “Waiting for RAID card firmware to become ready” screen the first couple attempts. I even left it overnight with that screen up and the little indicator spinning away. I decided to give it one more shot this morning to see what happened and it booted! I was thrilled, but write performance still sucks. Read/write caching are both enabled (as far as I can tell) and I’m almost at the end of my rope here…

I’m far from releasing all of my benchmarks and experiences with this new setup, but I have run into a couple of problems worth mentioning in my quest for the best possible storage performance.

First I attemped my new setup with a 3ware 9690SA-4I and I created a forum thread over at XtremeSystems.org documenting my failure with that… What a waste of time that card was… After that I decided to move on to the Onboard, but there ARE bottlenecks and compromises that have to be made doing that.

I don’t notice the same freezing/hitching or lock ups that some have claimed exist with Jmicron controllers on cheap SSDs, but I *do* notices a sluggishness at times. I don’t think it’s related to the SSDs, but rather to the southbridge. One way to replicate it reliably is the Windows Experience Index. If anyone can shed some light I’m very interested to hear why this happens during the CPU Test…

Wow. I can’t believe they’re here already. I was expecting these to take quite a bit longer!

Unlike all of the other test floating around on the web, I actually paid for these. That’s right, more than $2500 in hard drives for 320GB of storage. That’s a cost of $7.6/GB! Evidently I’ve completely lost my mind, but I’m confident that the performance and overall speediness of my machine will justify the upgrade. Let’s hope I’m right *gulp*. RAID 0 performance on ICH10R and a 3Ware 9690SA-4I PCIe 8x hardware RAID card to follow!

I’m very excited!