Blast from the past: originally published in 2003.
Testing RAID cards is a long and arduous process. The most difficult part was deciding on a standard cluster size for all cards. While the Promise cards can have from 8k to 2048k, Adaptec’s limit is 128k, and 3ware’s is 64k. All cards default to 64k cluster size, so who am I to argue? Just for comparison sake, I ran the [intlink id=”115″ type=”post”]Promise FastTrak100[/intlink] with three cluster sizes to see the difference.
| Adapter | WinBench 99 | IO Meter | HD Tach | |||||||
| High | File | Work- | Data- | Read | Read | Write | CPU | |||
| Drive Configuration | Cluster | Business | End | Server | Station | Base | Burst | Average | Average | % |
| RAID 0 Two Disk | 8 | 5220 | 6120 | 99.29 | 89.12 | 77.13 | 75.3 | 57273.8 | 2426.2 | 5.1 |
| 64 | 6270 | 10400 | 103.99 | 121.79 | 113.91 | 69.5 | 35164.6 | 28952.1 | 11.4 | |
| 512 | 6250 | 17400 | 104.21 | 121.14 | 109.99 | 74.7 | 24572.1 | 28384.8 | 9.3 | |
| RAID 0 Four Disk | 8 | 3960 | 3970 | 84.95 | 93.32 | 95.58 | 63.6 | 51357.3 | 1429.4 | 4.4 |
| 64 | 6000 | 9300 | 103.25 | 120.88 | 117.25 | 68.6 | 21714.6 | 30492.9 | 8.8 | |
| 512 | 7040 | 19200 | 108.23 | 126.71 | 123.94 | 74.5 | 21338.7 | 29240.3 | 8.3 | |
| RAID 0+1 Four Disk | 8 | 3960 | 3970 | 74.11 | 68.71 | 61.91 | 63.6 | 51357.3 | 1429.4 | 4.4 |
| 64 | 4680 | 3960 | 87.84 | 105.63 | 95.76 | 67.9 | 31950.1 | 1238.8 | 2.9 | |
| 512 | 4770 | 3630 | 94.75 | 113.85 | 101.67 | 65.7 | 23630.1 | 1245.0 | 2.8 | |
I’ve indicated best scores in a range with Bold face. I can’t account for the poor write scores with HDTach, although they were quoted in the December issue of Maximum PC as indicating their benchmark is not designed for RAID systems. All tests were run using the Test Platform.
On the two disk system 64k appears to be the clear winner. With four disks, 512k kills with RAID 0 and does well again with RAID 0+1.
