ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

I was checking Amazon the other day and saw both the 100GB and 200GB versions of the OCZ Vertex LE are available for pre-order. Both drives are next-gen (as of Feb 2010) performance wise and are said to be shipping sometime late February or early March.

I preordered the 100GB Vertex LE from Amazon.com. I’m guessing it will be available less expensively, but I wanted to get one of the 5,000 before they are sold out. It looks like these are going to be the only low-cost SF-1500 controller based drives for awhile, depending on what Other World Computing (OWC) does with their drives.

Here’s a quick update to the Patriot PS-100 32GB review including Raid 0 benchmarks with two drives.

Also, for comparison (to a much higher-end setup) see: Two OCZ Vertex v1.5 Firmware Raid 0 Benchmarks

Update 6 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up (single drive).

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A 32GB SSD drive for $60 after MiR sounded like a good idea, especially since that would be great for a Windows Home Server C:\ drive, so I purchased a Patriot PS-100 32GB. (It should be noted that I have not seen the price for $60 again in the following 3 months) 64MB of cache sounded better than a JMicron JMF602 based drive, and surely Patriot would not release in the fall of 2009 a JMicron branded drive. I assumed that the drive would be Samsung, Indilinx (akin to an OCZ Core V2) since 32GB was not an Intel controller sounding size (40GB, 80GB, 160GB MLC to date). My conjecture proved to be inaccurate.

Also, just for comparison here are Raid 0 Benchmarks with the PS-100 32GB and for a comparison (to a much higher-end setup) see: Two OCZ Vertex v1.5 Firmware Raid 0 Benchmarks and see two Intel X25-V 40GB’s in Raid 0 benchmarks for comparison of the Patriot PS-100 32GB to the popular Intel X25-V 40GB.

UPDATE 05 April 2010: See performance with new Patriot firmware #2.008 here

UPDATE 06 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up (single drive). This release had significant performance improvements.

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Updated the SSD Drive and Controller List with: OCZ m84 LSI and Indilinx controllers; Crucial M225 64GB, 128GB, 256GB drives

Updated the SSD Drive and Controller List with: G.Skill Falcon 64GB, 128GB, 256GB; G.Skill Titan 128GB, 256GB; Intel X25-M 80GB, 160GB; Intel X25-E 80GB, 160GB; Kingston SSDNow M-Series 80GB, 160GB

Updated the SSD Drive and Controller List with: OCZ m84, p84, Solid V2, and SuperTalent RaidDrive Series

SSD’s are becoming more commonplace and are available from a multitude of vendors. Despite a high level of vendor diversity for the drives themselves, there are only a few SSD controller options available, and the vendors do not necessarily list which controller a given drive has. In an effort to simplify the research process, the following list will be updated with which drives contain which controllers to make comparisons easier.
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Question: How does a OCZ Vertex 120GB compare to an 8 drive 15k RPM 2.5″ SAS Raid 5 array with a fast Adaptec 5805 controller?

Answer: It is slower… kind of… but both options have some great features! Read the full story

As high-performance hard drives move to the 2.5” form factor, a form factor that has been common in the SSD and notebook space, mounting these drives in traditional cases can be somewhat difficult. Purchasing 2.5” to 3.5” adapters allow system builders to mount a single drive to a space meant for a 3.5” drive, but that can be a serious waste of space.

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