Our colleague, Sergey Romanov aka GreY, developed a WorkStation pattern for Intel IOMeter basing on the StorageReveiw's study of the disk subsystem workload in ordinary Windows applications. The pattern was based on the average IPEAK statistics StorageReview provided for Office, High-End and Bootup work modes in NTFS5 file system and mentioned in Testbed3 description.

The pattern serves to determine the attractiveness of the HDDs for an ordinary Windows user.

Well, and in the end we checked the ability of the drives to work with sequential write and read requests of variable size, and tested the drive’s performance in DataBase pattern, which imitates the work of the disk subsystem with SQL-like requests.

The controller featured firmware version 2.36.02-R048. We used the driver version 3.05.

The controller was installed into the PCI-X/133MHz slot (even though Intel controller supports only PCI64/66MHz), the J4 jumper cap was removed, i.e. we allowed the controller to work in PC64/66 mode.

The WD360GD Raptor hard disk drives were installed into the default chassis of SC5200 case and were fastened at the bottom with four screws.

The workmode, arrays status and the like can be managed not only via the controller BIOS accessed during the system reboot, but also via the special Intel RAID Storage Console, which can be started right from Windows:

For our test session we used the following controller settings:

During the major tests we enabled lazy write algorithms for the drives:

And for some tests we had to disable them in order to evaluate the performance differences in both cases.

This time, when we tested Intel SRC14L controller, I actually had the first experience working with the Intel controllers BIOS. And to tell the truth there was something that nearly shocked me. This screenshot shows the integrated options for workload monitoring working in real time!