ICY DOCK MB982SPR-2S SATA HDD & SSD Raid Review

For our review today we wanted to try something a little different. Using two SSD drives in the Icy Dock might seem like the logical course of action, but we feel that a huge portion of the audience buying this will already have one or two mechanical 2.5 inch drives in a drawer, from previous system upgrades.

A standard 2.5 inch mechanical drive isn't going to set the performance world alight, even a 7,200 rpm model will peak around 85-110 MB/s. Therefore, with two drives in a RAID 0 configuration we could be looking at sequential performance of around 200 MB/s. While a mechanical drive will never match a quality SSD for overall levels of performance this theoretical ‘Raid 0' bandwidth is now firmly in the ‘SSD Budget' sector.

Today we are using two Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB drives, configured in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 has no (or zero) redundancy. It provides improved performance and additional storage but no fault tolerance. Hence simple stripe sets are normally referred to as RAID 0. Any disk failure destroys the array, and the likelihood of failure increases with more disks in the array (at a minimum, catastrophic data loss is almost twice as likely compared to single drives without RAID). A single disk failure destroys the entire array because when data is written to a RAID 0 volume, the data is broken into fragments called blocks. The number of blocks is dictated by the stripe size, which is a configuration parameter of the array. The blocks are written to their respective disks simultaneously on the same sector. This allows smaller sections of the entire chunk of data to be read off the drive in parallel, increasing bandwidth. RAID 0 does not implement error checking, so any error is uncorrectable. More disks in the array means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss.

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410
Comparison Drive: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

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