SSD Raid 5 or RevoDrive?

Ok so I am considering a 256GB OCZ RevoDrive for my new system its pretty quick at its 700+ read write speeds. However, looking through newegg it occurs to me that a raid 5 of smaller SSDs isnt much more expensive and has more redundancy.

heres a pic of what im thinking.



Should work out to ~ 200 GB of storage at a much higher speed than what the RevoDrive puts down.

I am considering that for about another 100 I could double that with 60GB drives also providing I can find ones with the same speed controller.

So what do you think?

There are a couple downsides.

That RAID card is bad and you lose TRIM.

I'd just go with the Revo, honestly. The only thing you gain from running them in RAID is redundancy and throughput speed. You will likely lose random access speeds because of the RAID controller. The whole point of having a SSD is because of the access times.

Even with Raid5 you would probably loose some performance anyways since its all about the controller card and how it works with the data going through it.

GC would take over for TRIM.

Personally if going for that choice I'd just get the Revo card and be done with it. Though depending on if you want to wait the Revo V3 is supposedly coming out relatively soon which will be faster, but as well have a nice price tag associated with it.

for the love of god dont get any sort of expansion card. just stick with the revodrive, or buy a couple sata3 ssds and run in raid0 off the mobo like me! it all runs finnee without trim. but yeah nah dont get any sorta of expansion card unless you buy one of the really good one which people use for servers and what not.. but if you can afford that then you might as well just buy another revodrive haha.

Well the revodrive is just several SSDs on a pcix4 with a built in raid controller. One of the points of considering raid 5 is the added redundancy. I have alot of faith in SSDs not to fail but sometimes you can never be to careful. I do love the scalability of raid 0 BUT I have experienced what it feels like to have an array of many disks in raid 0 loose one drive and melt a huge volume of data.

Still not sure one way or the other just yet this review is promising but still points out the downfall of raid 5 in less than outrageously priced controllers.

The problem you will have is that most decently priced RAID controller will be a bottleneck for the SSDs. There are cases where a RAID controller cannot even keep up with a single SSD, much less a bunch of em in RAID. The RAID controller in the RevoDrive was carefully chose because of its high IOPS combined with reasonable pricing. Doing RAID5 on top of this would bottleneck you even more.

In the review you link to the HighPoint controller pushes around 150 IOps in the workstation pattern in RAID5. This is the kind of performance it is designed for. In comparison in the workstation pattern a single Vertex 2 can push 13000 IOps. Can the RAID controller designed for doing a few hundred IOps scale to doing tens of thousands of IOps? I don't know, but don't assume it can unless you find some review that has actually tested it.

I was having a bit of a hard time reading some of the charts, anyway it looks like ill be sticking with the RevoDrive in my initial plan.

It was mostly just a late night curiosity.

You will like the Revodrive.. I just have the first gen one, but its pretty decent. The new ones must be pretty wicked

Im looking at this or this. The price difference to me is marginally important. Guess we will find out on the day I buy it.

ssjwizard said:

Im looking at this or this. The price difference to me is marginally important. Guess we will find out on the day I buy it.

Click to expand...

Ah the Rev 3's are out! Well guess if you want more speed Rev 3 if not Rev 2

Definitely go for the RevoDrive 3. It supports TRIM.

Mr Alpha said:

Definitely go for the RevoDrive 3. It supports TRIM.

Click to expand...

Here is a listing of tested MOBOs for the new RevoDrive 3...
Buyer beware, not all MOBOs work!