The linear read speeds are the same for both file systems, so we’ll show you just one diagram:

The linear read speed depends linearly on the number of the drives, so the RAID0 arrays of two and three devices show a double or triple speed of the single drive. The RAID0 array of four disks doesn’t unfortunately keep this tendency on. That’s the same as we saw in our review of the 3ware 8500-8 Escalade.

The linear read speed doesn’t depend on lazy writing, as we have expected.

The linear read graphs for every array are found by the following links:

• Linear read graph for JBOD (1 HDD);
• Linear read graph for RAID1 (2 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID0 (2 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID0 (3 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID5 (3 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID0 (4 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID5 (4 HDDs);
• Linear read graph for RAID10 (4 HDDs).

Conclusion

The 3ware 8506-8 Escalade controller left a very good impression, just like its predecessor, the 3ware 8500-8 Escalade. This controller showed good results in all tests, especially those that imitate work in real applications. There was certain instability in speed in synthetic tests, but I think such things are only of interest to specialists. I would like to emphasize the fact that the controller is now much faster at processing sequential read and write requests.

This controller showed most stable and predictable results among all SATA RAID controllers we have tested so far. We will be carrying out our tests to compare it to competitor products, though. So, stay tuned!

Appendix

At the time of writing this, only the version 7.7.0 driver was available for download from the manufacturer’s website. This set of firmware, drivers and utilities works in Windows 2003/XP/2000, SuSE Linux 8x, Red Hat Linux 8x and 9x, and FreeBSD 4.8 Beta. Regrettably, other driver versions (for example, the 7.6.3 release we used in our tests) that support other operation systems were unavailable at the moment.