OWC SSD Preliminary Testing

Just got in our large order of the OWC Mercury Extreme Raid Edition SSD's (200gb size). While I am waiting on the R910's they are destined for, I threw a few into an older Dell PowerEdge 6950 with quad Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.6ghz CPU's. I setup a single boot drive and a 4-disk RAID10 group. The RAID settings were set to 1MB stripe size, adaptive read-ahead, and writeback. Went through a normal Windows 2008 R2 Standard installation to run my IOMeter and (soon) SQLIO tests.

The results were pretty good.

Using 4MB IO sizes, they REALLY shined bursting over 2800 MB/s of thruput.

The details of the test were: 4MB IO size, 50% read, 50% write, 50% random and 50% sequential. The sustained average was a more-sane 1100 MB/s with the same settings.

Using 4k IO's, I saw over 600 MB/s, which is about what I expected, and the IOPs were good at >50,000.

Not bad for ~$2400 of storage, with a full 5-year replacement warranty.

Stay tuned for further, more detailed testing including SQLIO. I know you SQL Server guys like to see those. I'm running Oracle 11g R2 Enterprise on these 4 right now as a sandbox testing environment. Using these SSD's with Oracle parallel execution has made a GIANT impact on our application performance so far. Keep in mind, we're not a production shop, and no important data was at risk. This is just a "testing the waters" scenario before we move further.