And this is the Intel SRCS14L controller:

The first thing that immediately catches your eye on the box as well as on the controller card itself is the input/output Intel 80303 processor working at 100MHz frequency and featuring hardware support for XOR operation intended to increase the performance of RAID 4/5 arrays. The controller processor takes over the entire work with the drives and creates different RAID arrays from them, thus unloading the CPU and increasing the overall system performance. Intel SRCS14L controller supports RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 and 10.

The work with the SerialATA drives is actually performed by two SiliconImage Sil3112A controllers. Each chip has two channels, so that we get the total of four SATA-channels. The controller features integrated cache-memory, so that you will not be able to increase its size. There are 64MB of PC100 ECC SDRAM memory onboard.

The controller itself is designed as a low-profile PCI card. Since it is intended for the simplest servers, the decision to design it as a low-profile card seems to be quite logical.

The interface of the 64bit 66MHz PCI 2.2 bus is intended for 3.3V and 5V, is backward compatible with the interface of the 32bit 33MHz bus. Finally, the controller is equipped with a speaker (emergency alarm) and status LEDs.

Here is a list of Intel SRCS14L controller specifications, according to the manufacturer:

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel SC5200 case;
• Intel SHG2 mainboard;
• 2 x Intel Xeon 2.8/400FSB CPUs;
• 2 x 512MB PC2100 Registered DDR SDRAM with ECC;
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD;
• Onboard ATi Rage XL graphics;
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4.

We used the following software:

• WinBench 99 2.0
• Intel IOMeter 1999.10.20

For WinBench tests the hard drive was formatted as one partition with the default cluster size. The WinBench tests were run seven times each; the best result was then taken for further analysis.

To compare the hard disk drives performance in Intel IOMeter we used the FileServer and WebServer patterns:

These patterns are intended to measure the disk subsystem performance under workloads typical of file- and web-servers.