A Year With NVMe RAID 0 in a Real World Setup

Conclusion

This was quite an interesting article to do and so was the year with the speedy goodness coming from a RAID 0 NVMe setup. The drives that I used are quite old by now and there are a lot faster ones on the market now, so you could take the whole thing to even higher levels.

The fun aside, we learned quite a bit through this extensive real-world test. For example, I only wrote a total of 7874GB and read 10436GB combined across the two drives which isn’t much at all. These data amounts were written during 4675 power-on hours which equals to 195 days. From that on, we get that I’ve written about 21.6GB per day and that’s not a lot at all compared to SSDs rated TBW. Both drives also still feature a 100% lifetime remaining after this test and when we compare it to the 10-15TB I condition drives with during normal reviews, we get all put into a bigger perspective.

A RAID 0 setup does boost the performance in most areas, but not to double as you might expect. We get about 50% added performance in most areas, but it also comes at the sacrifice of slower access times. Still, it’s well worth it in my opinion and I’ll be returning to a RAID setup very soon – just with newer and larger drives.

So to answer our initial questions and worries, they are unfounded. Our drives easily survived this one-year test and they could have continued on for many more years without trouble.

Pros

• Better Sequential Performance
• Two drive’s capacity as one volume
• Coolness factor and bragging rights

Cons

• Slower access times

Neutral

• Random read IOPS down but writes up.