Introduction

RAID 0 is often looked down upon by the enterprise community since it lacks redundancy, but for the enthusiast looking to get just a little bit more the most basic form of RAID is a god send. For many years I have used the power of RAID 0 to enhance my computing and gaming experience. The benefits are so over the top sometimes it feels like I am cheating, and sometimes I may just be. One good example is the Battlefield series. Using very fast hard drives in RAID will allow you to get into an online game of Battlefield faster than anyone else. At that point you can hop in a plane, fly over and take out the other team's planes and helicopters before anyone else is even in the game. Keeping the other team pinned on the ground has a huge advantage in your team's strategy. The trick is finding a server that will allow you to keep doing this over in over, because with RAID 0 you can do it every time.

RAID 0 has many other advantages outside of gaming. Any application that can benefit from increased data transfer is significantly faster. Loading large pictures in Photoshop, movie files in Sony's Vegas movie editing program and countless other prosumer applications increase your productivity. Let's not forget that even Windows will operate much smoother when the operating system is on an array.

Today we will take a look at two of the fastest consumer solid state drives in RAID 0 arrays. The Intel X25-M has held the speed crown for many months and by pairing the Intel and Kingston X25-M with the latest firmware we will see just what the pair can do in RAID 0. The challenger features the new Indilinx controller that is quickly becoming the new standard in consumer grade SSD. RunCore sent us two 128GB drives from their new Pro IV line and let me tell you, these things are hella fast! Both sets of drives will be run on our lightning fast Areca 1231ML RAID controller. Let's get right to the benchmarks!