The 520 is pretty old right now. It has been superceded. Checked out the Samsung 850 Pro, Crucial M550, Sandisk Extreme, etc...? These are some of the fastest SATA SSDs out there. They are also MLC (two bits per flash cell) (AFAIK) and not TLC (3), so they should endure more writes (not that it matters much anymore). If you're going to do terabytes of writes per day, then it makes sense to go for MLC flash cell SSDs. In most series, the 128GB drives tend to be slower than the bigger drives, particularly in writes. Write speed is not a single number; sequential, 4K, random writes are all at different speeds with different drives so pay attention to the write patterns you would use.
Edited my post up there, check it out. I believe the MX100 is TLC. It's the 'budget' drive for Crucial, although it's plenty fast and my go-to choice for good performance / price SSDs. If you're ekeing out every last drop of performance, RAID makes more sense regardless. Just pay attention to the write speeds in different scenarios and you would be good to go (covered that a bit in my edit above).
I've read elsewhere that the MX100 is a good choice because it's not TLC. And that the Intel has amazing write speeds for its size. The benchmarks I've found vary wildly though and are of no use.
Hmmm that's true, the MX100 is MLC. Yes, I remember grabbing an Intel 520 128GB SSD for my brother's netbook, had great write speeds for a 128GB drive. I see your logic in this. Seems to me like it would be a good decision to go for the Intel 520 128GB RAID solution, then, but I'll leave it to more experienced users to chip in now.
You'll be capped out at a max of 300MB/s per SSD. Considering a PCI-E add-in SATA III RAID card or a platform upgrade?
Thanks for the help. I'm leaning towards the MX100 for simplicity. The write speed is roughly 317MB/s so I wouldn't be losing much, and it has a neat powercut protection feature. On the flipside the Intel drives might stand up to the intensive use better. I'll have a think.
When I had my ssd on sata 3 3 Gb/s it was about half the speed of my 6 Gb/s maybe a little more than half as fast. Sata 2 not really sure on the read writes for that. TBH for what your doing with the ssd I dont know if you will get decreased performance or not as I have no experience in what you described in the OP.
I have a 2yr old 60GB Intel 520. It's not bad, there are def faster drives out there but mainly I got it for the 5yr warranty. One annoying thing is Trim isn't supported on Intel SSD's in RAID. I have 4x 500GB HDD's in RAID 0 and even though the 520 is not part of that array it uses a RAID driver because on the same controller...... Here's a benchmark anyway if it helps......reads aren't great but the writes are good, too bad I don't write much to it. lol
I just purchase 2nd Samsung 840 EVO 250gb for £83.99 of amazon awesome performance for price http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-250GB-Basic-Solid-State/dp/B00E391OX6
I got the 250GB Samsung. It's not arrived yet of course. I wasn't content with buying Crucial based on my experience of some of their other products in the past. The Intel RAID set-up seemed like a faff; and the Samsung seems to have great speed and reliability despite being 3bit MLC (aka TLC). On reflection I'm happy with my decision. I'll have a look for a good cheap USB 3 enclosure soon
