Ok, so I just installed a pair of brand new 10′000 RPM Velociraptors in a RAID0 configuration to replace my Kingston V series SSD drive.
There was nothing actually wrong with the SSD, but I got sent the raptors as a warranty replacement for a pair of older drives and I wanted to see how they compared to the SSD. Before removing the SSD I ran Passmark on the drive and recorded the scores. I’ve just finished installing Windows and all my other gubbins on the raptors and have run Passmark again with somewhat surprising results.
Here are the results:
| SSD | RAID0 | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 333.9 | 1402.1 |
| Sequential read | 53.1 | 206.8 |
| Sequential write | 28.4 | 168.8 |
| Random seek + RW | 10.8 | 12.2 |
So there we have it – the raptors are significantly faster on all operations, with an overall score over 4 times greater than the SSD. The SSD was installed in the BIOS as a standard IDE drive. I’m not sure if a change in the BIOS configuration could improve the SSD’s performance, it probably could yield some gains, but could it be tweaked to improve its performance by a factor of 4? I’m not sure, but I am surprised that the raptors are that much faster.
** Update **
I reconnected the SSD as an additional drive and ran Passmark again, the SSD still came in way, way (way) lower than the RAID. This time the drives were all set to SATA, there doesn’t seem to be a setting in the BIOS to configure the drive mode on a per-drive basis, unless it’s tucked away in the BIOS somewhere non-obvious, but the mode is now set to SATA instead of IDE.
Kingston V series was proven to be a really slow SSD. Should have gone Intel or OCZ. The INTEL SSDSC2MH250A2 got a score of 2,687. See
http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/high_end_drives.html
I think I went with kingston purely on price. I see now why they were so cheap ;)