Introduction

Through a unique set of circumstances we were recently lucky enough to end up with two Intel 910s in our lab. We certainly could not pass up the opportunity to put both of these PCIe SSDs together to explore the limits of performance that can be reached with two of these powerful drives in tandem.

With one of the key selling points of the Intel 910 being its price, many customers will use more than one of these high performance SSDs in a single server to solve performance problems or to accelerate existing systems.

We did cover the Intel 910 more in-depth in our initial article, the Intel 910 800GB and 400GB PCI Express Solid State Drive Review. This article will provide a primer for those who are unfamiliar with the Intel 910.

In this article, we will merely be getting right down to benchmarking two of these impressive PCIe SSDs.

The Intel 910 aims to be a fairly easy device to configure and setup for end-users, with a very low overhead driver stack and easy to configure volumes. This certainly holds true, even for a multiple SSD setup. Once again it was just as simple as plug and play to get the hardware up and running with two of the SSDs. The only task left was to configure the volumes in the operating systems Disk Management utility.

In today's article, we will take a quick look at the speed of two of these devices together in an enterprise scenario. One implementation that the Intel 910 seems to be uniquely well suited to is in the very demanding OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) field. These types of workloads feature drive activity under some of the most punishing scenarios, with a heavy read/write percentage. The OLTP sector typically prizes performance over all other factors, including cost. The 910 looks to change this by delivering great endurance and high performance in a much more affordable package that would lend itself well to multiple card applications.

We will be performing simulations of this type of scenario and looking at some of the other types of applications that these SSDs may be deployed into.