X-bit labs

ATA RAID Controllers: Roundup of Four Low-Cost Models (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/25/2004 | 11:05 PM ]

Testbed and Methods

We can evaluate the performance of ATA RAID controllers only according to the performance of the disk array. For this purpose we created RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays of two Hitachi 180GXP 120GB hard disk drives (IC35L120AVV207-1 model) and then ran all the tests for these two arrays.

Here is a list of programs we used for our test session:

• WinBench 99 2.0;
• FC-Test 0.5.3;
• IOMeter 2003.02.15.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard (for Promise controllers);
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 system HDD, 15GB;
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 installed.

Performance in Intel IOMeter DataBase Pattern

With the help of DataBase pattern we will test the performance of our HDDs when they process requests with different queue depth and varying share of writes.

As usual, to offer you a more illustrative picture we made three graphs for the queue depth equal to 1, 16 and 256 requests.