Corsair Blog - RAID

Today we announced our newest line of solid-state drives, the Corsair Performance Pro Series™ SSDs. Designed with the Marvell SATA 6 Gb/s SSD controller, they deliver impressive performance when reading and writing compressed as well as non-compressible data, such as audio, images, and video files. Additionally, Performance Pro Series SSDs have built-in advanced background garbage collection to allow for consistently strong performance even with operating systems that do not support the TRIM command. This integral performance optimization makes Performance Pro SSDs an ideal solution for RAID configurations, which typically do not support TRIM.

As a leading supplier of solid-state drives, such as the award winning Corsair® Force Series™ SSD's, Corsair would like to help you get the most out of your SSD-based system. In this brief how-to guide, we'd like to show you how to nearly double the performance of your SSD based disk subsystem by using RAID.

RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. We won't go into the many different types of RAID configurations here. The basic concept involves combining multiple storage drives in an array to gain performance, fault tolerance, or a blend of the two. One SSD is great, so two SSDs must be incredible, right? Right!

This article will focus on RAID-0, which is the most common RAID configuration utilized strictly for performance. Many enthusiast and desktop motherboards come equipped with onboard RAID controllers. These can be built into the chipset, such as the AMD south bridge, Intel® ICH / PCH controller hubs, or the NVIDIA® MCP. Some motherboard makers add a second RAID capable disk controller to the motherboard board to enable a second RAID array. Users can also add additional RAID functionality with a PCI or PCI-e RAID card.