Moving to SSD storage from Platters: Where does RAID come in?

Solution 1:

Honestly, there are so many potential variables that the best approach IMO is to benchmark different setups and let the results help you decide. Software vs hardware raid, different performance characteristics between vendors.. whether you have a battery backup unit on the raid controller to accelerate writes all factor in.

I suggest you define what your requirements are for the RAID, how much redundancy you're looking for, what you're optimizing for (read speed? write speed? simultaneous read speeds?). Once you have that you exclude the RAID levels that won't meet your needs, then benchmark the remaining ones that can meet your requirements.

Anything less than that is basing decisions on anecdotal evidence and hunches. It'll probably still work but if you want to know what's best for your situation you'll have to figure that out on your own.

Solution 2:

If you need the capacity, you should still use the RAID solution that helps you meet your capacity, redundancy and IOPS requirements. Note: you didn't specify the SIZE of the SSDs you wish to use...

In many cases, that means continuing to use RAID 1+0.

I feel like your question is really something like, "make me feel better about using RAID 5"

You can do whatever works. I'd caution against hot-spares with the cost of this type of SSD. Keep a cold-spare handy and be done.