Putting SATA 3.0 to Work with Areca ARC-1880i and Crucial C300 256GB SSDs

Ok we all know the benefits of RAID disks over single disks and while the advent of faster onboard controllers and software RAID has made addon RAID cards virtually obsolete (in the enthusiast PC) you can't ignore the performance gains. Provided you are willing to pay for the opportunity to use them.

TweakTown decided to put a couple of SSD drives to the test, and in an attempt to further expand the "no duh" factor associated with the speed of both SSD and RAID they combined them together.  To do so they attached these drives to the latest hardware RAID controller from Areca and ran a few benchmarks.

Today our focus is on SATA 3.0, the latest computer bus interface for mass storage devices like hard drives and of course solid state disk drives. SATA Revision 3.0 or SATA 6 Gbit/s as it is also known replaced SATA 2.0 with several improvements including importantly for us here today a doubling of the maximum throughput from 375MB/s to 750MB/s per connected device.

What do you do with all that extra bandwidth that is offered by the new bus? You put it to work, of course! We hit up the folks over at Areca about a brand spanking new SATA 3.0 SAS controller that they have started selling and they obliged our request and sent on over one of their new ARC-1880i controllers for the job. Next up, we needed something to connect up to this shiny new RAID controller and we enlisted the help of the folks over at Crucial for this part of the mission. They were friendly enough to ship over no less than four of their RealSSD C300 256GB SATA 3.0 solid state disk drives.

Yep, you guessed it,  it's fast

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