Testbed and Methods

We had to use two controllers as we had hard disk drives that connect across two different interfaces. So we took two controllers from the same manufacturer:

• Promise Ultra133 TX2 (the BIOS version 2.20.0.14 and the driver version 2.0.0.29);
• Promise SATA150 TX2 Plus (the BIOS version 1.00.033, the driver version 1.0.0.27).

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard (i865PE chipset);
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU (533MHz FSB);
• 256MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM, CL2;
• IBM DTLA 307015 system HDD;
• ATI RADEON VE graphics card;
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

The drives had the following firmware versions:

We wrote the Maxtor drives through before the tests to avoid their forced write verification.

For WinBench tests we formatted the drives in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size (FAT32 formatting was performed with Paragon Partition Manager). We ran the tests seven times each, chalking up the best result. The HDDs didn’t cool down between the tests. For the FC Test we partitioned the drive into two logical volumes, 32GB each. For IOMeter tests, we used Sequential Read, Sequential Write, Database, Workstation, File Server and Web Server patterns. You can refer to our previous reviews for details about the patterns.