Would an array of SSD drives be able to succesfully substitute the system memory?
- by Florin Mircea
I watched a few videos trying to answer this.
This video (youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8) shows a bunch of guys stacking 24 SSD's reaching a peak of around 2GBps r/w. That's under the limit of the worst DDR3 in this list (memorybenchmark.net/write_ddr3_amd.html) - that shows DDR3 memory performance varying from 2.78 to 6.55 Gb per second, but that video is over 3 years old.
This video (youtube.com/watch?v=27GmBzQWwP0) shows a more optimistic situation, but for PCI-E SSD drives:
5 drives peaking at around 4Gb.
And this other video shows that stacking up more than 3 SSD's doesn't realistically offer a substantial added performance.
This and the fact that in all benchmarks the drives act quite poorly when dealing with small files (5k file read/write averaging from 10MB to around 30-40MBps) as opposed to how native memory handles such files, seems to indicate a definite NO to this question.
Also, the write life cycle is indeed limited and the drives might wear out quickly, as kindly pointed out by paddy.
However, I wanted to get more opinions on this.
Would it be possible to at least obtain current memory performance with SSD's in RAID 0? And if so, in what circumstances?
I am assuming using this configuration with a Windows OS that has a memory pagefile resident to that stack of SSD's, thus making it very fast to work with.
