Some reasoning between using ESata, USB 3.0, external harddrive, RAID 0.

This is a conversation between me and someone else, I documented my side.


There are errors and very few testing results in this doc. My essential question is. Is it worth to get a RAID 0 with 2 SSD for E6400? What about SSD + HDD , how much difference will it make?
(update: since I just finished reading http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=347870
I'm really giving up the hope for RAID 0 and go for 400GB HDD)

Original Doc:

I'll just write a little sum up of my readings and hopefully you can help me choose what to buy next. Seagates product pdf's can be found on their website.

Datas:

SSD
$ hdparm -tT
Timing cached reads: 13600 MB in 1.99 seconds = 6831.04 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 434 MB in 3.00 seconds = 144.56 MB/sec
SSD put on sata/eSata is much slower than being put on PCIe.(wiki) Our laptop is probably still having SATA I, not SATA II(3Gb), this is unconfirmed, maybe you can confirm it for me. SATA can handle the fastest HDD, but not the SSD.
USB2.0 60MB/s
USB3.0 400MB/s
eSata 131 MB/s
PC card dword reading, 133MB/s.
Common HDD 7200RPM, around 70MB/s as internal drive.

RAID 0 is distributing the data on both disks, probably interleaved, so that when reading, it can read odd bit from one disk and even bit from the other, producing maximum 2 times the original speed. The short come is, no redundancy, so one disk fails, the other can not be recovered. This combined with the SSD leveling wear problem can produce certain catastrophic results. So at a later age of the laptop I may need to either replace them or back up quite often. The other problem is if I want to use the feature. I need to reinstall all my systems to enable the fast reading/writing for system booting, software etc. Intel has a specific software to help with the level wearing problem, ubuntu 10 will also have such a software implemented. Thus, I am planning to upgrade when the ubuntu 10 comes out to totally rebuild my laptop system.

External hard drives.
Well, generally speaking, we can not have any current HDD exceed the eSata/USB3.0 bus speed. So if we want massive cheap backup or even portable hard drives, there is no point in buying something designed with eSata/USB3.0. USB2.0 can quite handle them. I wish I could have some backup server but since I left the lab, there is no hope now. I may buy this: seagate's blackarmor_ws_110 for 2 TB of storage. But their blackArmor_ps110_kit has totally no point in the sense of using a USB3.0 to PC card. The 7200rpm hard drive can't produce that data flow anyway. Not to mention the USB3.0 400MB/s will have the bottle neck of PC card. They are just using the USB3.0 to cheat on customers. USB 3.0 will come out on 2010, Linux kernel is already supporting it. But there is only 1 or 2 mother boards on market right now supporting it with hardware. Our laptops won't be able to handle it anyway(PC card adapter in Seagate's BA 100ps will be a bottleneck, and I haven't seen other solutions.) And I doubt any motherboard in market can actually handle it right now. (Got to have SATA III and usb 3.0 at the same time, or maybe RAID 0).

Conclusion for External hard drive: There is really no point in buying something extremely fast in this case, for backup or a slower but huge storage to carry around. SSD would be too exp for > 1T.

The other good news is google doc recently started to allow the users to upload files in ANY format. This may serve as a remote backup system .

Questions for you:
What will be the speed boost of RAID 0 on the system? Is there a linux kernel support for RAID 0? What is the best SSD to purchase right now?

 

Some of the reasons are listed here for my giving up on RAID 0. I hope Weegie can explain if he's running RAID 0 on 2 hdd's or SSD's, if the overhead on HDD is the main culprit, maybe SSD won't be following this case since its addressing should be much faster and give some boot.

 

I just updated to bios A20, some additional boot up options appeared(eSata, modular bay etc), but nothing about RAID 0 yet.
Anyone how to ask Dell people when or if possible they will get RAID 0 going for the ICH9M-E chip?