Testbed and Methods

The following benchmarks were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0

Testbed configuration:

• Intel SC5200 system case
• Intel SE7520BD2 mainboard
• Two Intel Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs with 800MHz FSB
• 2 x 512MB PC3200 ECC Registered DDR SDRAM
• IBM DTLA-307015 hard disk drive as system disk (15GB)
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics controller
• Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 4

The controller was installed into the mainboard’s PCI-Express x8 slot. We used Fujitsu MBA3073RC hard disk drives for this test session. They were installed into the standard boxes of the SC5200 system case and fastened with four screws at the bottom. The controller was tested with four and eight HDDs in the following modes:

• RAID0
• RAID10
• Degraded 8-disk RAID10 with one failed HDD
• RAID5
• Degraded 8-disk RAID5 with one failed HDD
• RAID6
• Degraded RAID6 with one failed HDD
• Degraded RAID6 with two failed HDDs

As we try to cover as many array types as possible, we will publish the results of degraded arrays. A degraded array is a redundant array in which one or more disks (depending on the array type) have failed but the array still stores data and performs its duties.

For comparison’s sake, we publish the results of a single Fujitsu MBA3073RC hard disk drive on an LSI SAS3041E-R controller as a kind of a reference point. We want to note that this combination of the HDD and controller has one problem: its speed of writing in FC-Test is very low.

By default, the controller suggests a stripe size of 256 kilobytes for arrays, but we set it always at 64KB. This will help us compare the controller with other models (most competitor products use a stripe size of 64KB) and, moreover, this is the data block size every version of Windows, up to Windows Vista SP1, uses to process files. If the sizes of the data block and stripe coincide, we can expect a certain performance growth thanks to reduced latencies.

By the way, choosing the stripe size for your RAID array is not an obvious matter. If the stripe is too small, the number of operations the array has to do increases, which may affect its performance. On the other hand, if the array is mostly used for an application (a database, for example) that works with data blocks of a specific size, it may be reasonable to set the stripe size at the same value. This question used to be debated hotly in the past. By now, applications have generally learned to access data in blocks of different sizes and the speed of arrays has grown up, yet this factor should still be taken into account when you are building your array.

We used the latest BIOS available at the manufacturer’s website for the controller and installed the latest drivers. The BIOS was version 5.2.0 build 16116 and the driver was version 5.2.0.15728.