Disk Options and Comparisons

We have 3 disk options that conform with the low power requirement (< 2-3 Watts?):

• Solid State Drives
• Flash Memory Cards
• Hybrid Drives

To compare options amongst these drives, we need common parameters that give us a decent and standard metric. Some parameters are:

• Power Consumption (Idle and Peak)
• Read/Write Speed (Data Transfer Rate)
  • Sequential Data
  • Random Data
• Cost per Gigabyte
• I/O Interface Support and Bottlenecks
  • PCIe
  • USB 2.0/3.0
  • SD/MMC

RAID

RAID gives the option to provide better read/write performance.

OCZ Vertex2 120GB SSD (Measured 230 MB/s write throughput)

2 disks RAID0 was installed on Core2 and achieved measured 469 MB/s write throughput.

However 2 disks RAID0 was installed on Atom D510 but only achieved 238 MB/s (dd) 295 MB/s (hdparm) write throughput.