HDD raid setup as fast as SSDs?

[Testbuilds]

I saw on Tomshardware that two Samsung 840 Pro SSDs in Raid 0 offer no noticeable performance difference in regular use compared to one drive, but what about putting enough HDDs in a raid setup that they would get the same performance? Would it be possible with a Raid 6 setup?

[Broxigar]

Yes it is possible.

 

Pros - Massive storage space & drive redundancy

Cons - Need expensive RAID card & many HDDs

[That Norwegian Guy]

A single 840 Pro is already approaching the limit of saturating SATA III completely. Thus, striping data across two of them will not improve sequential reads and writes much. What it will do is give you headroom from performance dips, and pick up slack on in/out operations per second. (IOPS)

 

So striping together SSDs in Raid 0 does achieve greater performance, but not much, what it really does is achieve a lot better data transfer and access rate stability.

 

So not getting a huge tangible feeling of SSD speed by using them in Raid 0 does not mean you shouldn't do it. In addition, each drive will last 2X as long in a 2 drive config before a physical failure (approx.)