Testbed and Methods

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel SC5200 system case;
• Intel SHG2 mainboard;
• Two Intel Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs (400MHz FSB);
• 2x512MB PC2100 ECC Registered DDR SDRAM;
• IBM DTLA 307015 system HDD;
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics core;
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

We used the following benchmarking software:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15.

We created one partition for the total capacity of the array in WinBench 99. We ran WinBench tests seven times each and then analysed the best result.

We used File Server and Web Server patterns for tests with Intel IOMeter.

These patterns help to benchmark the disk subsystem performance under a workload typical for file and web servers.

The Workstation pattern is created by Sergey Romanov aka GReY basing on the statistical data about the disk subsystem workload as given in the SR Testbed 3 description. The statistical data are gathered for the NTFS5 file system in three operational modes: Office, Hi-End and Boot-up.

This pattern shows how well the controller performs in a typical Windows environment.

Lastly, we checked out the controller’s ability to process sequential read/write requests of variable size and its performance in the Database pattern, which loads the disk subsystem with SQL-like requests.

Our controller had the firmware version 7.6.3 and we used the driver from the same pack (version 7.6.3). The 3DM Disk Management utility helped us control and synchronize the arrays. We installed the controller into a PCI-X/133MHz slot.

WD360GD (Raptor) hard disk drives were installed into the rails of the SC5200 system case and fastened at the bottom.

The BIOS of the 3ware 8506-8 Escalade controller doesn’t have an option of changing the lazy write status for the hard disk drives. We assume, however, that the states of the caches (of the controller and of the hard disk drives in the array) all change when we switch between WriteBack/WriteThrough modes. That’s why we use WriteBack/WriteThrough terms (WB/WT) – which stand for the settings in the controller BIOS – to describe the test modes. So, all caches (of the drives and our controller) are enabled in the WriteBack mode and disabled in the WriteThrough mode.