Matching up a pair of already quick SSD's was always going to show massive leaps in performance. Read speeds almost topped 1000 MB/s while write speeds also showed a fair increase in speed. The blistering pace of the read speed was however surpassed by the Intel 730's star quality, sustained speed over long periods. Looking at the IOMETER test where we asked the drives to write small chunks of data (4k) continuously over a 12 hour period it is clear that RAID 0 had a major impact. The drive started out quick and unlike the single drives, the level of performance was as good at the end of the 12 hour period as it was at the beginning.



Aside from the average write speeds, our main gripe with the Intel 730 is the price. At £180 it is far from cheap and pairing two together only exasperates this issue. Most of Intel's SSD competitors offer slightly faster drives for less. Intel themselves have a faster drive codenamed Wolfsville but this is more expensive still. So yes, having a pair of Intel 730's will offer very fast read speeds and fantastic sustainable writes but even in Raid 0, write speed of two drives falls behind the very best single drive offerings. A buyer of the Intel drives would likely be someone who has lots of trust in the brand and who is looking for a very durable service offering reliable sustained write speeds that can compete with enterprise devices.

To summarise:
The Intel 730 Jackson Ridge is a good drive on its own, better in Raid 0 but ultimately, unless sustained write speed is of extreme importance to you there are faster, cheaper alternatives available.