Corsair Blog

PC enthusiasts are always trying to find ways to improve the performance of their enthusiast systems by upgrading their current system with newer and faster parts. One good way to get a performance boost is by running two solid-state drives in RAID 0. Knowing this, we have decided to illustrate a simple way for our customers to improve their RAID 0 performance, with any of Corsair's full line of Force Series, Reactor Series, Nova Series, Performance Series or Extreme Series solid-state drives. All without spending a huge amount of time or money to do it.

One way this can be accomplished is by updating the system storage controller drivers with the newest Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver in combination with a compatible Intel chipset-based motherboard. Let'set's see how much of a performance difference we will attain after the update with the Nova Series, Reactor Series, and Force Series SSD's using ATTO...

Two Corsair Reactor Series R60 SSDs in RAID 0:

Two Corsair Nova Series V64 SSDs in RAID 0:

One very interesting point to note is the 8kb block size. Usually on smaller blocks your performance is poorer. However after the driver update, the read results were quite impressive. Notice on the Nova Series SSDs, the read performance before the update is slower than the write performance unless the block size above 128kb. After the update, read performance dominates write performance from the start.

Two Corsair Force Series F200 SSDs in RAID 0:

After these tests were completed, we decided to get a little creative and put four Performance Series P64 SSDs in RAID 0 to see what kind of results we would achieve.

Four Corsair Performance Series P64 SSDs in RAID 0:

I think these results speak pretty well for themselves!

The Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RAID) driver version 9.6.0.1014 seems to have a positive effect when placing Corsair SSDs in a RAID. The read performance is significantly boosted by these drivers, and they also now hit max performance with the 8kb block size instead of 128kb block size of the older driver. Write performance is not affected as much but also saw a consistent performance increase there as well.

Overall with the new Intel Storage driver in combination with Corsair’s SSD drives in RAID 0, the read speed performance is dramatically increased with the lower block sizes. This looks like a pretty good way to boost performance of your already fast Corsair SSD’s with no cost and little effort. You can download the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers here.

Test System

• CPU: Intel Core i7 920
• Memory: Corsair TR6G1600C8D DDR3
• Motherboard: Asus P6X58D Premium
• Video Card: ATI 4870 512MB
• OS: Windows 7 64-bit