Just 4 SSD reviews and a RAID SSD review this week, again making it quietest week this year for SSD reviewing. This is possibly also due to the Easter where reviewers are taking time out than in front of the PC doing their write-up. Anyway, this week includes 4 reviews of different drives and a RAID card with 8 Micro C300′s at RAID level 5.
One problem with pretty much all the RAID card reviews up until now is that the reviewers only benchmark them in RAID 0. While this is the RAID level most enthusiasts use, very few if any businesses will risk running a server’s disk set in RAID 0, even with the most reliable hard disks or SSDs available. RAID cards usually perform very different at different RAID levels, especially at RAID level 5 or higher, which most businesses use for a balance of cost/gigabyte and redundancy. In fact, the review carried out by The SSD Review of the LSI 9265-8i is the first review I’ve seen that ran benchmarks at RAID 5, the RAID level most businesses use in their servers.
The following are the latest SSD reviews published since our last Review Friday:
- Intel 510 Series 120GB @ TechSpot – 29th April – (SATA3) (Real World)
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB @ Storage Review – 27th April – (SATA3) (Sim)
- Intel 320 series 300GB @ The Guru of 3D – 27th April – (Sim)
- Corsair Performance 3 128GB @ Storage Review – 26th April – (SATA3) (Sim)
The following is a review involving a RAID card with multiple SSDs:
- LSI 9265-8i 6Gbps MegaRAID & 8 Micron C300 SSDs @ The SSD Review – (PCIe) (RAID5) (Sim)
Legend:
- Real World – Includes real world tests, such as boot, app launch, file copy, etc. timings.
- Sim – Simulated real world tests, such as replay of read/write traces.
- SATA3 – SSD features an SATA 3.0 6Gbps Interface.
- PCIe – SSD connected by PCI Express interface.
- RAID5 – RAID array configured in RAID level 5.
Since I started the “SSD Review Friday” series, one thing I have noticed is that not a single posting has received a comment. This is despite each review Friday post receiving several hundred views. Maybe everyone is just heading off to the reviews and that’s it, but I’d love to hear if anyone has any comments to make on this series and if there is any way for me to improve it. E.g. is there any review specifics I should mention, etc.? The only thing I can confirm is that I am receiving review link submissions, so please keep these coming!
If this post remains comment free, I’ll just assume everyone is happy as is. 
Your listing of reviews is great. Gives a good perspective of what’s going on in the industry.
I meant also to say that to post comments, you must self register yourself as an ssdfreaks wordpress user. Not hard to do, and now that I understand WordPress, it is easy for me to understand the process. But before I started my own WordPress blog, I had often come across that WordPress login screen and automatically assumed I couldn’t get past that point. Now I realize there is a small “register” link on it, and it allows you to self register via any valid email address. I wonder if that WordPress login screen can be modified (I’m sure it can be), to make more obvious that a) you aren’t logging onto “wordpress”, but instead to the ssdfreaks site and b) that it is easy to self-register.
The WordPress login screen is something I never thought of and probably explains why very few register. While we know what WordPress is, some probably assume it’s a 3rd party service (like registering for Facebook) and go no further. I’ll see if there is a way I can customise the registration page, even if it means changing the default WordPress image/text.
After a quick look around, it turned out that there is a plug-in for this called “Theme My Login” (link) which makes the register, login, forget password, etc. pages match the theme of the site, which looks a lot neater now than the default WordPress pages.
Better, but still might still need some work – while it now looks like you are logging onto ssdfreaks, it still isn’t obvious that you can auto-register yourself. I”m trying to figure out the same thing with my blog! The alternative is to have open comments (no need to register to leave comements), but in that case, you’ll want a comment spam blocking service like akismo or somesuch.