A couple benches

[ebarone]

Here is a couple comparison benchmark tests. The three windows on the top are benchmarks of the OCZ Z-Drive m84 that I'm currently booting off of. It goes HD Tach Long bench / HD Tach Quick bench / Crystal Disk Mark.

 

The bottom three windows are the same tests run on my 2x Intel X25-M G2 160GB RAID 0 setup. It also goes long bench / short bench / crystal disk mark.

 

I'll post back in about 30 minutes after I break the Intel RAID, secure erase the drives, and restore them to factory defaults. For comparison's sake, the drives have been in use for roughly 5 months.

 

[Water_Hazard]

Why not enable write back cache? Also, is that m82 z-drive out yet or is it an ES?

[ebarone]

Its been out for a while, its this one. Also its m84, sorry, OP changed.

 

Write back cache?

 

I'll have the cleaned Intel RAID up today, I had a couple scary moments getting errors during a firmware flash, and then HDDErase hanging at its own startup. And if you tell me what that is exactly, I can enable write-back cache too

[Water_Hazard]

ah OK, the m82 is what had me confused.

 

I'm horrible at explaining things so here is a definition of write back cache

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/write_back_cache.html

 

I noticed a pretty significant speed increase with it enabled, especially on my SSD. I have always used write back cache since I started messing around with raid arrays about 4 years ago and have yet to have a problem (knock on wood). For your intel drives you can go into the intel storage manager and right click on the drives and at the bottom you should see enable write back cache. Not sure about the z-drive, you may be able to do it the same way.

[ebarone]

Ohhhhhh that, I thought I had that enabled... where does it say I dont? I will make sure its enabled when I get back to my system this evening.

[Water_Hazard]

It never said you don't but with HD Tach on all of my drives, when I have it enabled, get burst speeds of like 3000mb. So I was just assuming you didn't have it enabled. Plus I think your speeds would be a good bit higher with it enabled. My 2 OCZ agility 2 drives in raid0 average 556mb/s read in HD Tach

[ebarone]

After breaking, secure erasing, then rebuilding the array, and ensuring that write back caching was enabled, theres the VASTLY (couch) improved results-

 

 

I guess the takeaway here is a) I dont write to my disks very often, and b) under my own normal use of this system, I havent suffered significant performance degredation over time due to lack of TRIM support for my RAID setup.

 

If/when I ever add a third drive to this, I will post more benches