When you wanted to squeeze that little bit of extra speed out of the hard drive data transfers from your workstation the easiest option was to install a RAID array.
Some motherboards have them built-in by default, like the one on my main workstation at the office, or they come as add-in cards such as the ones in our office file severs that can have dozens of hard drives hooked up to them.
The reason to use a RAID card is to squeeze as much performance as you can out of a physical machine, i.e. a spinning hard drive.
But with SSD drives not far off from becoming mainstream is there any reason for parallel RAID systems for most users?
It appears that most SSD manufacturers are still thinking linearly when it comes to creating their devices, trying to make ever faster memory chips to handle an increased data throughput.
My proposal is to create an SSD that is already a parallel array of memory chips that would increase the transfer rate of an SSD drive up to the theoretical maximum of the SATA bus.
To go beyond that speed would require a RAID array and separate controller that would then be able to transfer data as fast as the PCI-E bus could handle.
An internally parallelised SSD could just pop right in to any machine that can take a replacement hard drive.
And of course if the SSD is running in parallel internally and then is used in a RAID array, double bonus!
Less drives are required and there is no need for a very high-end RAID controller to get the full transfer speed of the computer’s bus.