SSD RAID considered pointless

The Tech Report, one of the best hardware review sites I know of, has just completed a test of a number of different SSDs of differing capacities. One of the most surprising results?

A RAID0 setup with matched SSDs has performance on a par with or actually lower than a single mechanical hard-drive.

The results are available here, but one of the key graphs is:

… where the RAID configurations are all at the bottom of the chart.

This goes to prove yet again how much SSD performance is dependant on TRIM support – something that (at least) Intel driver-based RAID setups don’t currently offer.

It’s worth noting that if running Linux with ext4 on LVM (not md RAID) then both support ‘discard’ to issue TRIM commands even if the device is part of an array.