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Solid State Drives (RAID) superhuman speed

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DeLuSioNal29:
Check this out...

24 Solid State Drives in Raid

clok:
Somebody want to send me a couple (no i dont need 24) to test out for say, 1-2 years?


Clok

VicBond007:
SSDs are only now reaching speeds that are useful.  Previous generation drives, as young as 3 months ago, used controllers to maximize their single file read/write speeds so that review sites could sell SSDs with fantasy numbers that don't apply to the real world.  VERY rarely with "normal" computing are you going to have large blocks of sustained, single file read/write activity.  Ever wonder why those 4-drive Raptor RAID0s pulling 500MB/sec still take minutes to boot Windows?  It's because their random access read/write still sucks, and until recently, most SSDs had really bad random r/w as well. 

I use a current-gen Intel X25-M in my video editing computer as a system drive, and will be using one in my MAME cabinet as well despite the price tag of over $300 for 80GB.  This SSD, along with the X25-E, and OCZ's Vortex SSD, use a new kind of controller which lowers the single file performance, but boosts the random r/w performance tremendously.  The X25-M has a random read/write performance that is over 50x faster than my 300GB Velociraptor, the king of consumer level hard drives.

What's this mean for a MAME cabinet?

My editing rig has a lot of add-in cards with specialized drivers, so even with a clean startup, my boot time was over 2 minutes.  with the SSD it is 16 seconds after the POST sequence finishes.  Managing thousands of ROMs, refreshing directory lists, building control.dat files, any sort of mass-automation that the MAME cab user does on a regular basis is now done instantly.

Anandtech recently did a great write-up comparing SSDs and explaining just why people who manage thousands of small files (us!) should toss our platters out the window:  http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

Interestingly, the Samsungs shown in this video are one of the worst in the bunch, actually under-performing a Velociraptor in a lot of scenarios, even in random writing.

Turnarcades:
Wish I knew more about RAID arrays as a storage source as I would probably run one in my cab.

Bluedeath:
with 24 disks in raid 0 even if you use punched cards instead of diksks you would have lightning speed.

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