Introduction

We are back on the subject of Solid State Disk drives again and this time you're in for a real treat! This will be an adventure into extreme high-end storage with massive amounts of performance on tap.

We managed to convince our contacts over at Patriot Memory to send us on over a grand total of four of their impressive Warp 2 SSDs - if you want to read more on the drives, you can head over here and read Chris' review from last year.

Areca Technology sent us one of their ultra fast ARC-1231 SATA RAID controllers so we could get the most out of our Patriot drives. Modern day solid-state drives are so fast that they saturate the Southbridge of a motherboard with as little as two drives. Because of this we needed the bandwidth that only an 8x PCIe controller could provide.

We have seen plenty of single SSD performance numbers published here at TweakTown, but when it comes to SSD RAID performance, not a lot has been covered. In this article we are going to put the four Patriot Warp V2 drives through a series of tests, not only in RAID 0 but also all the other popular RAID levels under the sun.

What we are aiming to achieve in this article, besides showing off incredibly powerful RAID 0 performance, is to give consumers an idea of the level of read and write performance they can expect when running SSDs in various RAID levels. We covered them all - count them... 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and single drive for good measure. We even tested with write caching enabled in RAID 0.

How about we get this show on the road now and head on over to the next page to firstly read about the hardware we used!