Will SSD drives make this DS faster for random access? What RAID would you recommend for ultra-fast random access?
246096
Certainly. Don't have any recommendations, except, at this stage in the technology evolution, to look for one that does its own housekeeping, something that used to be done by TRIM support on the O.S. I heard that nowadays some controllers do this themselves, so you don't have to check what the OS does in that respect.
246097
yes/no, and it's complicated. 1) there is now a 10Gbe fiber uplink version of this called the DS1815+ if you need to reach for insane speed. 2) there are only some types of data access pattern that really benefit from SSD cache. 3) there is a hidden limit. With the 1GB of ram that this comes with, you can only do like....40GB of SSD cache. With the 3GB upgrade you can do more, like 120GB of SSD cache. 4) if you need more than that, you have to consider the DS1815 with the fiber SFP+ ports since that will go to 6GB of ram, and therefore 240ish GB of SSD cache. Any SSD you put in OVER what the ram in the unit can map is wasted. 5) if you need good random IO and over 240GB of it, consider populating the entire unit with SSDs and no spinning disk at all. 6) if you decide to that, consider Raid10 over Raid5-6 to avoid parity calculation hit.
673587
Absolutely, I would always recommend RAID 1 or 10 if you can afford the extra drives. Though I've not yet done it, SSD's should be able restore a RAID array faster in the event of a failure.
1361545
I apologize for not actually answering your question. But, I just want to offer an observation. I do not believe that there will be anything to be gained by Thunderbolt 2 as long as you are connecting it to a 6Gb SATA connected drive... Or, to a spinning hard drive, for that matter. Even with a speed striped RAID won't come near the maximum capacity of a Thunderbolt 1 (or even USB 3). I think that solid state drives, attached through PCIe are going to be required to achieve any speed gains moving forward.
1028213
I'm running 4x1.5TB drives with ZFS RAID-Z and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a flash drive with 2x4GB 1333. It's been performing very well, no complaints! I'm just not looking forward to when I have to upgrade those drives, at least they were free.
391634
Yes, I'm using it for the same reason (add extra sata ports). You can disable the raid.
1944266
that depends on you mother board...raid x is raid x ....but sata3 is way faster then 1 or 2 ... then thers how meany drive you put in raid vs the max speed of you raid card what ever it is
800516
Can you run RAID that way? Id like to install 2 2TB drives, for large capacity RAID.
1748583
The RAID feature is the only difference, the choice is do you just want up to 8 individual drives (JOBD) or do you want to protect you data from loss (RAID). I have both units and they both function great.
334283
Just install a SSD drive, then there will be no lag time, as SSD drives do not have to spin up!
923996
No. This card has no RAID functionality. You need to find a card that offers RAID 1, which is drive mirroring, to do what you're looking to do.
1030640
It won't be as fast as an ssd drive in the slot. You might look into moving your optical drive external and putting a drive in the optical bay.
499322
I'm in the very same situation... got my SSD Sandisk 256GB but would prefer to have the ADATA 128GB if it would be faster. You can reach me at laborges at hot mail . Thanks!
2235988
Don't use raid with FreeNAS, setup a zpool with raid-z1. Zfs is awesome, just put tons of ram in and make a zil cache.
1149652
I had not attempted raid yet, it does however afford me a score of 7.9 on win 7 x64 with a sata III SSD though....
1208628
It's 5400RPM, so access times are "slower" than a 7200RPM drive. It has an 8meg cache vs. a 16m cache. I'd venture to say that neither of these are noticeable to the typical user. It's hot-pluggable SATA II, which are current capabilities. The 7200RPM/16m version is only about $5 more.
140742
You may have poor performance with that many disks simply because of the processing power required for an array that large. But there is no reason that this wouldn't work. If you're looking for a 16+ drive solution I would suggest something like the 2413+
1897261
I think you want a RAID array, that is a number of hard disks linked together with a total capacity approximately equal to all the drives summed up (depending on RAID type in use). The latter is not a recommended RAID configuration (if one drive fails, whole thing goes down) and can be complex to set up. Short answer: Maybe, but better not, just get a newer higher capacity hard drive for the same price or lower later on down the line :)