Question: I watched a few videos trying to answer this.
This video (youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8) shows a bunch of guys stacking 24 SSD’s reaching a peak of around 2GBps r/w. That’s under the limit of the worst DDR3 in this list (memorybenchmark.net/write_ddr3_amd.html) – that shows DDR3 memory performance varying from 2.78 to 6.55 Gb per second, but that video is over 3 years old.
This video (youtube.com/watch?v=27GmBzQWwP0) shows a more optimistic situation, but for PCI-E SSD drives:5 drives peaking at around 4Gb.
And this other video shows that stacking up more than 3 SSD’s doesn’t realistically offer a substantial added performance.
This and the fact that in all benchmarks the drives act quite poorly when dealing with small files (5k file read/write averaging from 10MB to around 30-40MBps) as opposed to how native memory handles such files, seems to indicate a definite NO to this question.
Also, the write life cycle is indeed limited and the drives might wear out quickly, as kindly pointed out by paddy.
However, I wanted to get more opinions on this.
Would it be possible to at least obtain current memory performance with SSD’s in RAID 0? And if so, in what circumstances?
I am assuming using this configuration with a Windows OS that has a memory pagefile resident to that stack of SSD’s, thus making it very fast to work with.
Answer: 24 SSD’s reaching a peak of around 2GBps r/w.
“Peak” is the operative word here.
?
DDR3 memory performance varying from 2.78 to 6.55 Gb per secon
Whatever speed DDR3 is running at, it will run at that speed all the time on every access. ?You get the peak rate from an SSD only under an ideal condition (data is in cache, data is aligned properly, all flash lines not in use, etc.)
If you had a drive that was essentially battery backed RAM such as this you could achieve something near to this performance possibly (though the interface will be a limiting factor and never as fast as direct-to-CPU connected RAM), though it would be costly, power hungry, probably less reliable, and likely not fit in your PC if you want more than 32GB or so.