The Tech Report takes a look at four X25-E Extreme SSDs in RAID. Sure, it only packs 32GB of storage, and yes, you'll pay a princely sum for the privilege. But with a smart storage controller, near-instantaneous seek times, and the ability to sustain reads at 250MB/s and writes at 170MB/s, the X25-E actually represents good value if you quantify its performance per dollar.

Although the recent wave of solid-state hard drives that's flooded the market primarily targets mobile applications, SSDs aren't quite ready to replace their mechanical counterparts for most users. The price is simply too high at the moment, not only in terms of the total cost of a drive, but the cost per gigabyte, as well. However, we don't have to wait for prices to fall for SSDs to make sense in the enterprise world. For those less interested in storage capacity and more concerned with throughput and the ability to handle a barrage of concurrent I/O requests comfortably, solid-state drives like Intel's X25-E Extreme have a great performance per dollar proposition.

Interestingly, the perks that make SSDs attractive for notebooks also pay dividends for enterprise RAID configurations. The X25-E's 2.5" form factor is easy to pack into low-profile rack-mount enclosures, and thanks to the drive's very low power consumption, there's little need to worry about excessive heat. Because solid-state drives lack moving parts, the environmental vibration that can become problematic in a tightly-packed array isn't an issue, either.

As we've seen today, a collection of X25-Es in RAID 0 can be very fast indeed—under the right circumstances. You need the right sort of workload to exploit the enormous performance potential of four of the fastest flash drives on the market. With our Adaptec 5405, our array offered the best performance scaling with sustained transfers, in particular with real-world writes. As one might expect from solid-state storage, the array also made short work of our multitasking and multi-user loads, delivering the best performance under our most demanding loads.