# SATA III VS. PCI-e (SSD performance)



## sushimaster (Aug 1, 2011)

New member, excuse me if there is an up to date thread on this subject.  Glad to be here, hope I can be of some help to someone out there.  Seeing as how I just registered, it is obvious that I had a question for you.  Thanks in advance!

Basically, would a pci express SSD have higher performance than a raid 0 array of SATA III drives?  

Specifically, if the highest performance PCI-e drives are ~1.5 Gb/s and I have a raid 0 array of three or more SATA III drives (@ ~.5Gb/s) will I see similar performance?  Will I require a separate RAID controller to get peak performance?  Are there any charts that address this specific inquiry?

Thanks again!


----------



## linkin (Aug 1, 2011)

An SSD would have better performance the RAIDed HDD's I believe.

Have a look at the OCZ RevoDrive: http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=18029

Insanely fast. Would saturate any SATA port.


----------



## Cromewell (Aug 2, 2011)

sushimaster said:


> New member, excuse me if there is an up to date thread on this subject.  Glad to be here, hope I can be of some help to someone out there.  Seeing as how I just registered, it is obvious that I had a question for you.  Thanks in advance!
> 
> Basically, would a pci express SSD have higher performance than a raid 0 array of SATA III drives?
> 
> ...



The thing with a RAID0 is that while it makes your drive performance faster it's not across the board. Certain tasks are much faster on a RAID0 and others aren't much faster than you would get with a single drive.

I'd say linkin is right, the best way to get fast drive performance right now is an SSD.


----------



## sushimaster (Aug 2, 2011)

*Hmm...*

Well, thank you both...

linkin, I was actually posting the question because of the revodrives.  From what I read on newegg...  the lowest end/_highest performance_ revo drive is 480GB @ $1,659.99...  
Max Sequential Read
    Up to 1500 MB/s
Max Sequential Write
    Up to 1250 MB/s
4KB Random Write
    Up to 230,000 IOPS 

Now...  This SATA III drive from corsair
is  60GB @ $149.99
Max Sequential Read
    Up to 555MB/s
Max Sequential Write
    Up to 495MB/s
4KB Random Write
    Up to 80,000 IOPS 

While it wont provide the same capacity, from the look of these numbers it seems like three of these drives in raid 0 equate to the same performance (if not better, excluding capacity) as the ultra expensive RevoDrive...  Am I overlooking something?  I've been looking around today for numbers regarding the SATA III throughput.  Does it provide 6 Gb/sec *PER* SATA channel, or _in total_?  

Thanks for the help guys, much closer to figuring this out...


----------



## Cromewell (Aug 3, 2011)

> Does it provide 6 Gb/sec PER SATA channel, or in total?


Should be per channel.


> While it wont provide the same capacity, from the look of these numbers it seems like three of these drives in raid 0 equate to the same performance (if not better, excluding capacity) as the ultra expensive RevoDrive.


RAID0 doesn't scale linearly, I don't think you are really supposed to RAID SSDs either.


----------

