4x Intel 510 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 on LSI 9260-8I Linus Tech Tips

Linus Tech Tips investigates how four Intel 510 120 GB SSDs perform in a RAID 0 configuration using the LSI 9260-8i controller, pushing the system toward an internal bottleneck on the card itself. The video begins with a description of the four drives in RAID 0 with a 128 KB stripe and discusses the testing setup, including CrystalDiskMark and PCMark Vantage runs. Early results show read speeds around 1.5 MB/s, indicating the RAID controller itself is the bottleneck for reads, while write speeds scale notably as drives are added, approaching roughly 1 GB/s with four drives. The host then compares this external controller setup to an onboard controller running two drives, illustrating that the two-drive onboard configuration can rival or even exceed the four-drive RAID 0 in some metrics, and he notes that the benefit of adding more drives through the add-in controller is limited when not all workloads benefit equally. As the tests conclude, the video presents side-by-side charts and discusses how application type affects performance, concluding that while four drives in RAID 0 outperform the onboard two-drive setup in most tasks, the advantage is not universal across all programs such as video editing, antivirus scanning, or system boot times. The final takeaway emphasizes the practical limits of PCIe bus bandwidth and the realized gains from quadrupling drives under this specific controller and platform, offering guidance for enthusiasts considering similar configurations and reminding viewers that not all workloads will scale with additional drives in RAID 0.

Topics · technology · hardware · storage · raid · ssd · benchmarking · pc hardware