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I couldn't find relevant data to compare. I'm thinking of buying either 4 X 60 GB OCZ Vertex 3, or 3 x 120 GB Vertex 3 MAX IOPS Edition. Which setup would give better performance?

Thanks.

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    Your title must be some cryptographic code, right? Right!? Oct 20, 2011 at 21:00
  • That is a lot of acronyms and abbreviations in that title... Oct 20, 2011 at 21:11
  • SSD and performance? Are you talking about read performance or write performance? Why RAID0?
    – Nils
    Oct 20, 2011 at 21:24
  • Both read and write. Because it's the cheapest way to get more speed.
    – Oktay
    Oct 20, 2011 at 21:54
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    RAID 0 - AKA ScaryRAID. I'd probably go with the 4x 60GB and shove them in RAID 10 Oct 21, 2011 at 21:20

5 Answers 5

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I've no idea about best performance, but are you quite sure about RAID 0 on that many drives?

The Sandforce chipset in the Vertex 3 is not known for being very reliable. With 3 or 4 of them combined, there's a real chance of full dataloss.

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    +1 RAID0 = you don't care about your data Oct 20, 2011 at 21:17
  • I don't care about the data since the server will be my benchmarking and development system.
    – Oktay
    Oct 20, 2011 at 21:47
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Using OCZ Vertex 3 drives will guarantee you cheap thrills down the road: these devices are unreliable even without the added excitement of RAID 0. Of the two choices that you have offered, 3 x 120GB MAX IOPS is the better one. However, I would recommend neither option.

Instead of putting multiple SATA SSDs in RAID, consider a single PCIe SSD. For example, the RevoDrive 3 series RVD3-FHPX4-240G would deliver:

  1. Better real-world performance than three or four SATA SSDs in RAID 0 (typical RAID controllers are designed around the limitations of spinning disks and can't keep up with the performance of these SSDs)
  2. Greater reliability relative to a RAID 0 solution (fewer connections, fewer points of failure)
  3. Lower cost than the SATA RAID option.
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  • Thanks for your answer. I've checked the benchmarks of both RD x2 3 and RD 3 and they are not even near the performance of real hardwar raid 0. I'll use LSI 9265-8i which is very good controller and designed for especially SSDs.
    – Oktay
    Oct 23, 2011 at 8:36
  • Fair enough: if you use one of the world's fastest controllers, which by itself costs about as much as a RevoDrive, then you will end up with a mind-numbingly fast array.
    – Skyhawk
    Oct 24, 2011 at 10:14
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Depends entirely on your workload and what kind of IO you are doing.
Lots of small random I/O is going to be faster with the MAX IOPs drives.
The Vertex 3 60 GB drive is somewhat terrible for small random 4k reads for example, so MAX IOPs will outperform (somewhat). (The regular vertex drives are terrible for my database workloads, at least.)

The drives are all plenty fast though for large sequential read/write, so, for lots of sequential large read/write, just throwing more disks at it will speed things up.

However, you will need to benchmark against the actual type of load you have, in order to determine which solution will work better for your needs.

There are spec sheets on the OCZ site that has IOPs details and MB/s read/write benchmarks.

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  • Thanks for your answer. I'll be benchmarking databases on the system. So should I go for max 4K random read/write speeds?
    – Oktay
    Oct 20, 2011 at 21:48
  • You should read up on your particular DB running on your OS and find out what page/extent size it uses for drive IO. DBs are usually tuned to work with block IO, often only one or two sizes. 8K and 64K are usually good choices to guess at for modern SQL DBs but you really need to know your specifics to drill down.
    – Mark
    Oct 21, 2011 at 20:07
  • It seems INNODB performance can be tested by checking 16K random IO.
    – Oktay
    Oct 23, 2011 at 8:38
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I've did some more research and decided to go with 5 x 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS edition in RAID 0 array. I'll add more ram to the server and this will cover the reads. For disk writes 120 GB MAX IOPS gives better random 16K performance.

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I would personally go with a Crucial M4. But is there any reason you want SSDs only for storage? For the cost of those SSDs you could get quite a few 1tb drives and run them in RAID 50.

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  • I'm guessing he wants the high random-I/O performance of SSD's for use with databases. Oct 22, 2011 at 21:51
  • Ew. RAID 50, really?
    – Skyhawk
    Oct 23, 2011 at 2:42
  • They will be used for the database applications. So hard disk drives are not in the competition :)
    – Oktay
    Oct 23, 2011 at 8:37

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