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Since we are going to compare mostly dual-channel SATA-RAID controllers (i.e. the simplest ones, or “desktop” ones, if we can say so), we selected workstation hard disk drives: two SATA drives from Seagate – Seagate Barracuda SATA V 120GB (ST3120023AS). The second secret motive guiding our decision to take these particular drives was my vital desire to check if SATA drives from Seagate could work well in RAID 0 arrays. As you remember, we have already had a confusing situation with Seagate HDDs (see our article called Seagate Barracuda ATA IV in RAID 0: Truth and Fiction).
Well, it’s high time we introduced our testing methodology to you.
Testbed and Methods
Since there is a “chipset” SATA-RAID controller from Intel among our testing participants, and it can be only tested if there is an i865.i875 based mainboard, we had to completely change our testbed configuration, so that all controllers could be tested in equal conditions.
As a result, our testbed looked as follows:
- Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard (i865PE chipset);
- Intel Pentium 4 2400MHz CPU with 533MHz bus;
- 256MB PC2700 CL2 memory;
- IBM DTLA 307015 system hard disk drive;
- ATI RADEON VE graphics card;
- Windows 2000 Pro SP3;
- HDDs for RAID arrays: Seagate Barracuda SATA V (ST3120023AS) with 3.01 firmware.
We used the following benchmarking software:
* - we had to shift to a new Intel IOMeter test version, because version 1999.10.20, which we have been using all this time doesn’t work correctly with the CPUs supporting more than 2GHz core clock rate. At first glance, the use of newer benchmark version didn’t push the HDDs to work faster, but the CPU utilization measured by the test got considerably lower.
Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of Hitachi Feature Tool Utility (the AAM register of the drives was switched with HighPoint controller installed, because with all other controllers the utility didn’t see the drives at all.
For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster (to format the drives in FAT32 we used Paragon Partition Manager utility). For FC-Test the arrays was split into two logical drives of the same size.
The tests were run seven times each, the maximum result was taken for the diagrams. The drives didn't cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please, see our previous articles.
For some controllers we took the results twice: promise controller was tested with two variants of possible caching settings: Write Back/Write Through (see the details in our Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V Hard Disk Drive Review). And as for HighPoint controller, we had to test it twice for a totally unusual reason. The thing is that this controller performed really slowly with the 2.34s driver, and I decided to return to the previous driver version 2.33s. You will see what has come out of it very soon.
The controllers were tested with the following BIOS/driver versions:
