Conclusion & Possibilities

Given our benchmarks, we can safely say that using USB drives in a RAID0 can bestow upon you a solution faster than traditional hard drives, given the right hardware. From writing, to reading, to access times, our RAID0 device outperformed the 7200RPM hard drive in side my laptop, and probably outperformed many other ATA-based drives out there.

What can you do with a RAID0 device? If you're got a database below 4GB in size, I recommended running it from these drives. You're going to see huge gains in response times and read speeds. Queries inserting data may lag behind traditional drives, but we feel that in some cases this setup will outperform it. We just wish we had the resources to verify this claim.

Additionally, Vista's ReadyBoost seems to be all the new rage these days. You don't have to feel left out in Linux. This setup would be a fantastic drive to use as a swap partition when compared against spinning drives. If I didn't have several gigs of RAM in my box already, you can bet this is what I'd be doing.

The idea of this article was to explore solid state storage options and give an idea of what we'll be in for once Solid State Hard Drives are upon us. Based on our benchmarks, we believe that solid state drives will eventually take the performance crown from current spinning models. We are already seeing faster access times, and we imagine read-write speeds are better in some parts that others.

SSD Manufacturers have already promised speeds faster than what our RAID0 has given us. If we get our hands on a SSD in the future, you can expect an article comparing those claims to what we've found.

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