Performance in FileCopy Test

Attention: today we are going to try our FC-Test not for HDDs testing but for the performance check of RAID controllers. The most interesting thing here is that our colleagues from tech-report.com web-site have already used our test for RAID-controllers comparison (you can check their article here).

But back to our roundup. So, we tried to use the standard FC-Test methodology. We created two logical drives of the same storage capacity on a hard disk drive (in our case on a HDD array). These logical drives were formatted for FAT32 and for NTFS. Then we created a set of files on one disk, read it from the disk, copied into a directory created on the first logical drive (i.e. we performed a copy operation within one partition), and in conclusion, we copied this set of files onto the second logical drive. The new 0.5.3 version of our FC-Test is a little different from the previous 0.3 one. The new build has archiving emulation; for each operation it reports not only the time spent, but also the average speed (as we know the size of all pattern files). All in all, it has now become much more interesting and convenient to work with this test :)

The obtained results turned out really exciting:

In each line the red color indicates the worst results, while the blue color – the best. We can clearly see that the optimization of the lazy write performed by the Promise controller in WB mode speeds up file creation so greatly, that Promise becomes an indisputable leader. However, during reads Promise driver in WB mode slows down the controller performance: in WT mode it performs much better.

Note that SiliconImage controller reached 88MB/sec when reading the files from the ISO pattern, which is the double read speed from the single Seagate Barracuda ATA V HDD! This way, I believe there are no more questions about the work of Seagate hard disk drives in RAID arrays: they do work.

There is one more very curious fact: Intel’s controller three times outperformed all the others in MP3 pattern. Either Intel software developers like this music format very much, or the slogan about Intel CPUs being the center of your digital universe has now been introduced into chipsets too.

Not very high performance of the 3ware controller during files creation is probably caused by the fact that this controlelr, as well as Promise, works in WB mode. Here, however, the WB mode is implemented on the hardware level, and not via software, because 3ware controller is the only one among all testing participants, which can boast onboard cache-memory.