Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel SC5200 system case
• Intel SHG2 mainboard
• Two Intel Xeon 2.8 processors (400MHz FSB)
• 2 x 512MB PC2100 ECC Registered DDR SDRAM
• IBM DTLA 307015 hard disk drive
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics controller
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4

We tested the controller in Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15. We used FileServer and WebServer patterns in our Intel IOMeter tests.

These patterns are intended for measuring the performance of the disk subsystem under workload typical of file- and web- servers.

We also use the WorkStation pattern, created by Sergey Romanov (a.k.a. GReY). It is based on the statistical data about the disk subsystem workload as given in the StorageReview Testbed 3 description. The statistical data for the NTFS5 file system are gathered 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 was tested with the firmware version 9.02 and the drivers from 2.4.1.40 set. To control the array status and synchronize the arrays we resorted to 3DM Disk Management tool.

The controller was installed into the PCI-X/133MHz slot (although it only supports PCI32 66MHz).

WD740GD (Raptor2) hard disk drives were installed into the default baskets of the SC5200 case and were fastened with four screws at the bottom of the drive.

During our test session we enabled the lazy writing for our hard drives. We changed the controller lazy write options (WriteBack and WriteThrough) as needed.