so I promised to do a video update when I had a chance to run the eight ocz Onyx
Series ssds in raid zero so you can see I've got these hooked up to an LSI Mega
raade fast path SSD optimized RAID controller and uh
what fast path does is it actually allows ssds to perform a little bit
better so fast path is just the little uh the little key that I have on there
it also enables some Advanced encryption features as well as the ability to use
ssds as a cache for a hard drive uh rate
array so that's a this is a pretty cool card this is the
9260 and it's uh it's actually a SAS I
did an unboxing of it it's a SAS 6 gbit per second card but as you can see it's
obviously compatible with uh SATA 2 ssds
I shouldn't even call it SATA 2 what I mean to say is SATA 3 GB per second so
here I'll show you actually here why don't we take this video as an
opportunity to show you how easy it is to set up a RAID controller card uh in a
raid zero configuration so first of all I want to show you some benchmarks here
you can see that with this array we were able to achieve uh almost 700 megabytes
per second read which honestly shouldn't
be that impressive this card is capable of well over 1 GB per second read with
the right ssds so that I was actually a
little bit disappointed in but the right speeds are very impressive the right
scale scaled almost linearly on these ssds so we were able to achieve up to
450 mb per on rights so I'll show you
what I mean by all of this in just a moment here
um this is kind of interesting I wasn't
having any challenges with the uh with
the raid configuration before or you know what I think it
is well looks like you get to
uh see some real time troubleshooting
here I think we've just got the wrong IP address cuz I was using this at home so
uh I have the the system IP wrong 192168
3185 so let's just do
that and there we go so let me just log in
here all right and now we're going to go into the
uh the mega raade configuration so the reason I'm a little bit disappointed
with the with the overall read speeds is you can see with well you would were
able to see you can see with a twood drive array so this is using all the
same raid configuration uh we were able to achieve 307 megabytes per second
already now with ssds typically with a good quality RAID controller like we
have and uh and a good quality SSD you should see almost completely linear
scaling so while these drives are rated for uh 125 mb per second reads uh
maximum you can see with two drives we were actually seeing that these drives
perform a little bit better than spec and they're scaling extremely well
because only two drives yield such strong read results now the this down
here is the random uh performance so you can see even with uh eight
drives uh random performance doesn't change very much so we've only got about
6,000 iops in 4k performance which is actually still very good compared to any
hard drive I mean you got to sort of keep that in perspective but uh
performance didn't really scale much from two drives all the way up to eight
drives so you can see two drives we were seeing about 20 megabytes per second and
then up to eight drives we see about 25 now with a deeper Q depth and a bigger
array you do see more uh you do see better performance and what that means
is that if you're multitasking a lot on a huge array like this you're going to
see better performance and it will continue to scale versus if you're not
multitasking and you're just uh reading and writing small 4K files now another
thing that did scale really really well with adding more drives was the rights
so you can see right iops are almost 3x
when we add uh four times as many drives so that's still reasonably good scaling
so I just want to show you the numbers as we go through here so remember this
is uh eight drives this is the run I just did like two seconds ago and then
this one here is with two drives so this is with four drives so you can see from
2 to four did not scale nearly as well so back to to two up to four did not
scale nearly as well in reads as from 1
to two because from 1 to two we got almost linear
scaling but you can see that especially rights scaled incredibly well so our
sequential rights doubled actually a little bit more than doubled and then
our 4K rights more than doubled so very
very efficient there and so then from four drives I went to six drives so once
again you see quite limited
scaling in some areas but again excellent scaling on the sequential
right so that's where we're seeing just just huge improvements and then finally
this is an eight Drive run that I did before I I was using slightly better
tweaked raid settings so that's probably actually the one I should be showing you
more than more than any other one but uh but yeah that's how I was able to
squeeze just a little bit more sequential readout of the whole thing
and uh actually substantially better uh 4K random rights so anyway that was
pretty much my video um I think that
what we've discovered here is that using 8 ssds of uh very very low performance I
mean the Onyx is a value SSD there's uh there's no two ways about it uh I think
what we'd be better off with is using something like four to six higher
performance ssds uh something like a Vertex 2 I mean vertex 2 right out of
the box is going to outperform probably anywhere from 2 to to three of these
Onyx ssds so what I discovered uh
running this experiment is that you're probably better off with fewer ssds but
higher performance ones so I'll just show you really quickly when you have a
when you have a premium raid card like this how easy and how quick it is to set
up a uh a raid array um all you really do is go into
actually you know what no I can't show you this because I wanted to actually boot up to the uh to the SSD raid array
so uh nope I can't wipe out my array but it's really fast you have to just
believe me you click this button up here you select the drives you press raid
zero and then there are actually some options that you can configure so if I
go into my virtual drive here I believe I can go to Virtual Drive and I can s
all the Virtual Drive properties so these are some of the things that that
you can Tinker around with if you do set up an SSD raate array so I've set things
up uh according to how LSI has recommended for the best fast Path
Performance although some people do report better performance with no read
ahead um and some people do get better
performance with right back cach enabled as well as cash Dio it really varies
depending on your SSD so you have to tweak and find out what works well with
your controller and your SSD so thanks for checking out our little uh raid Zero
Performance video don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips