MyDigitalSSD SuperSSpeed S301 128GB SLC Chris Ramseyer Edition RAID 0 SSD Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 10/11/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

As promised we have for you a RAID 0 review of the only LSI SandForce drive we’ve ever seen that is unaffected by incompressible data. That drive of course is the MyDigitalSSD SuperSSpeed S301 128GB SLC Chris Ramseyer Edition drive (click here). This drive based on exotic SLC NAND gave us our best performance to date by any SATA III drive ever.

We want more as usual so with this in mind I purchased 2 of these drives so I could bring our readers a RAID 0 review. We declared this to be the fastest drive we’ve ever tested which is quite a feat for a 128GB SSD because typically larger capacity drives are faster. The drives are roughly $2 per GB which is about twice as much as a good MLC based drive. So what would make this drive worth you spending twice as much for the same capacity? Performance and durability are the reasons. These drives cost $275 which is approximately $1200 less than any other 128GB SLC drive we know of, which in my opinion makes the drives a better value than MLC drives that have never been more than $1 per GB considering that most MLC drives of a similar capacity are rated for about 30,000 times less program/erase cycles and don’t have nearly the performance of this beast.

As our readers know RWL is absolutely dedicated to bringing you RAID 0 reviews that show just what maxed out performance for a pair of drives looks like in capable hands. We are doubling down on this commitment now that RAID 0 TRIM has arrived. These are exciting times for the world of SSD’s right now with new and faster drives popping up almost daily right now.

Today we bring you the fastest consumer SATA III drive made to date in RAID 0 which is going to be quite a show. Because this is going to be a RAID 0 TRIM review its only appropriate that we list the prerequisites necessary for functioning RAID 0 TRIM to avoid any confusion. There are three prerequisites for functioning RAID 0 TRIM. 1) You must be running an Intel Z77 board, processor doesn’t matter you can use any 1155 socket CPU. 2) You must have an 11 series OROM as part of your motherboards BIOS which should come built in on any Z77 board. 3) You must be running an 11 series Intel RST storage driver. Here is the driver we recommend you use: (click here) choose the third one down and install in Windows.

Something worth mentioning is you must enable write caching on the array to get results like you will be seeing in this review. 11.5+ RST drivers require both windows caching policies to be checked BEFORE the RST control panel will allow write caching to be enabled. This is important because performance will be as much as 50% slower when writing data if write caching is NOT enabled in the RST control panel.