Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB in 4-Disk RAID Review

Final Thoughts

Conclusion

Having an SSD in your system is a great performance gain in compared to having a mechanical HDD, we all know that. And it is a lot of fun, even when it’s an SATA3-based drive and not one of the new impressive NVMe drives. Still, it can get better and it does so when you start to set them up in RAID.

Pretty much any modern SSD has a controller and firmware that is RAID ready, so there’s no real reason to be worried about your drives. At least not more than you would be with a single drive setup. On the contrary. With most RAID setups, you have drive redundancy that keeps your data safe, even if one of the drives should fail.

There are huge performance increasements to be gained from a RAID setup and the Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB drives did a really great job in our tests. Depending on the setup, we saw performance gains up to three times those of a single drive. Of course, it depends on your choice of RAID setup how much and what areas will be improved.

RAID 0 gives you the most capacity and performance, but no redundancy. RAID 1 only works with two drives, but it provides redundancy for a drive failure. RAID 5 only takes one drive for redundancy while it protects three other ones from data loss in the event of a failure, but it does so at the cost of write performance. RAID 10 is a combination of RAID 1 and 0, providing redundancy and speed, but at the cost of two of the drive’s capacity. So which one you pick, is really down to what you’re going for. There are ups and downs to each mode.

Pros

• Up to three times performance scaling
• Drive redundancy in case of failure
• Single data-volume for ease of use
• Great at sequential and random operations
• Toshiba controller and MLC NAND
• Up to 1TB capacity options
• 5-year advanced warranty program
• Acronis True Image cloning software included

Cons

• More drives to purchase also means increased costs
• Various ups and downs depending on RAID mode

“Having a single SSD is fun, but having four in a RAID setup takes your system to a whole new level.”

Thanks to Toshiba OCZ for providing us with these sample drives