Are these benchmarks OK?

[shawnoen]

Installed my 160GB Intel SSD last week and never ran any benchmarks ever before on any hard drives....not sure what is considered normal or good...

Is it normal for the write speed to be higher on two regular drives in RAID 0 compared to the SSD?

Ran these today with AS SSD software.

This is for the SSD (TRIM is enabled and current firmware):

And two 640 GB WD Black Caviar drives in RAID 0 (aborted in the middle of test):

And a single 1TB WD Black Caviar for storage (aborted again):

 

[shawnoen]

Never ran the Intel Toolbox before so did that (it only took about 10 seconds) and re-ran. Write speed went up a bit but the rest is the same....

 

[drescherjm]

The SSD looks fine. The rest appear to be influenced by a cache at least for the unrealistic "access times".

[edit]I guess the access times for the drives were not updated as a result of all the 0 MB / s numbers.[/edit]

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

The X-25Ms are well known for having really crappy sequential write speeds. Intel said that it was apparently a limitation of MLC flash since their SLC X-25Es had 'normal' write speeds. But other SSDs with Samsung, Indilinx, JMicron, and Sandforce controllers all have much higher sequential write speeds with MLC SSDs than Intel, so it's probably just an arbitrary limitation to differentiate the SLC and MLC drives.

But yeah, ~80-90MB/s sequential write is fairly normal for an Intel X-25M, and it's probably the only real disadvantage the drives have.

 

[shawnoen]

Ok, thanks!

 

[ToddW2]

Those screen shots are insanely misleading since you did not let the other mechanical drives finish, they make it appear as if the mech. drives access time matches the SSD... lol

 

[drescherjm]

Now that makes sense. I was trying to figure out how the access time numbers were that low for a hard drive.

Also the point of a SSD over a hard drive or raid array is access time and thus small reads and writes not STR (and large reads/writes) since access time is what matters most of the time. Well unless all your reads and writes are 100 MB and you get the full 100+ MB/s STR of the drive/array so the load of the 100MB file takes 1 second.. For this you better have several dozen GB of ram.