Intel IOMeter: Sequential Write Patterns

I wonder what will happen during writes.

And during writes the testing participants no longer march neck and neck :)

Two controller based on SiliconImage Sil3112 chips fell out, because they lose speed when working with 8KB data blocks. It looks as if the controller drivers were trying to undertake something to optimize the controller work with 8KB data blocks. However, in case of sequential write there is nothing to optimize, as the data flows in a stream anyway...

The controller integrated into Intel ICH5-R proved pretty successful in this test: its performance with 8KB data blocks is really impressive. However, the performance of Promise controller in WB mode is beyond any competition: impressive!

Promise controller drivers in WB mode enlarge the write requests size, which has a definite positive effect on the performance. However, we shouldn’t forget that enormous CPU utilization is the price we have to pay back for the high speed.

So, in Sequential Read and Write patterns the best result belongs to Promise controller, and the most disappointing result unfortunately was shown by HighPoint RocketRAID 1520 with the latest 2.34s driver.