jmke

Intel's X25-E Extreme SSD is far and away the fastest flash drive we've ever tested. Sure, it only packs 32GB of storage, and yes, you'll pay a princely sum for the privilege. But with a smart storage controller, near-instantaneous seek times, and the ability to sustain reads at 250MB/s and writes at 170MB/s, the X25-E actually represents good value if you quantify its performance per dollar. That might not be how most folks look at value in the storage world, but for the demanding enterprise environments at which the Extreme is targeted, it's often the most important metric.

While the X25-E's dominating single-drive performance would surely satiate most folks, its target market is likely to seek out even greater throughput and higher transaction rates by combining multiple drives in RAID. The performance potential of a RAID 0 array made up of multiple Extremes is bountiful to say the least, and with the drive's frugal power consumption and subsequently low heat output, such a configuration should cope well in densely populated rack-mount enclosures. Naturally, we had to test this potential ourselves.

Armed with a high-end RAID card and four X25-Es, we've set out to see just how fast a RAID 0 array can be. This is easily the most exotic storage configuration we've ever tested, but can it live up to our unavoidably lofty expectations? Let's find out.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16291/1

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Kougar

This was an interesting article as I was very curious to see how two to four Intel SSDs would perform on the current best RAID controller. Unfortunately that is just a huge disappointment!

On the bright side, Intel cut their SSD prices again today.

X25-E ~$425
X25-M $399 shipped @ Newegg