Intel 16 Drive X25-E SSD RAID Sets New 2.23GB/s Speed Record

You might remember Samsung's 24 SSD RAID test-rig from back in March, which could hit peak sequential read speeds of 2.12GB/s and rip a DVD in under a second.  The guys over at Tom's Hardware, however, decided they could do better, and so armed with sixteen Intel X25-E SSDs and two Adaptec 5805 PCI Express RAID cards they created a huge rival RAID that managed to surpass Samsung's.

In fact, they saw throughput figures of 2.23GB/s – that's 2.23 gigabytes of data every second – using two hardware RAID-0 arrays linked up using Windows' own software RAID functionality.  Running all the drives from a single Adaptec card with more than the eight ports on offer with the 5805 was another option, but then they worried they might run into PCI Express bandwidth limitations.

Best of all, they didn't have to put together some barnstormer of a PC to host all this; in fact they used their standard test rig.  That doesn't equate to a cheap option, though; given the Adaptec cards retail from around $520, and the X25-E 64GB SSDs from $669 apiece, you're looking at just short of $12,000-worth of hardware before you get to such mundane matters as CPU, RAM and motherboard.