Final Thoughts

Yeah, so I'm the lucky guy who gets to use this insane four disk RAID 0 Kingston SSDNow E Series SSD drive plus Areca RAID controller configuration in my personal system from now on. And wow wow wow, it is just as good as or better than I thought it would be when coming up with the article idea.

It took us some time to get what we considered a reliable test result, since most of the benchmark applications fancied testing the controller cache memory, rather than the actual flash memory, on the SSDs. We decided on using HD Tune Pro, as it provided the most accurate result, but even it used the cache memory when providing the burst speed results, hence why we left that part of the test out from our benchmarks.

Once we did get this under control, we saw truly amazing storage performance out of this storage setup - HD Tune Pro showed a maximum read speed of close to 830MB/s and even the average and minimum read speeds were really close to the maximum speed and that's just stunning, in a really, really good way!

As far as write speeds go, we used ATTO to measure the performance and with the four drives in RAID 0 we saw results nearing on 580MB/s. Putting both these incredible read and write speeds into prospective, it is the fastest storage setup we've ever tested at TweakTown and we get brand new SSD drives into our labs almost daily. It completely kills what the Fusion ioDrive and PhotoFast G-Monster-PROMISE PCI Express solid state drives are capable of producing by over two times or so. Windows 7 Ultimate x64 final OEM managed to boot in mere seconds after it passed the POST stage of the system boot process - the first login screen at the Windows boot you don't even see properly, as it races past it at record pace.

Would the average consumer buy a storage setup like this? Well, I'm sure every tech enthusiast would want it, but at a cost close to $4000 USD just for the storage part of the system, it is out of reach of many. However, it is very interesting to see in this technology demonstration what storage technology today is capable of at the ultra high-end and what consumers can expect in the years ahead.

We would like put out a big thanks to Kingston Technology and Areca Technology for providing the hardware for this article. You guys know how to make some damn fast hardware!