Performance in FC-Test

And now let’s take a look at the performance of Promise FastTrak TX4300 in a “single-user” mode.

We stick to our traditional methodology of using FC-Test: we create two logical volumes, 32GB each, on the array and format them in NTFS and then in FAT32. We create a set of files on the first volume, and then this pattern is read from the array, then copied into a folder on the same partition (copy-near – inside one and the same logical volume), and finally copied onto another partition (copy-far).

The test system is rebooted between the tests to avoid the influence of the OS’s caching on the results. We use five file patterns here:

• Install (414 files, 575MB in total)
• ISO (three files, 1.6GB in total)
• MP3 (271 files, 1GB in total)
• Programs (8504 files, 1.4GB in total)
• Windows (9006 files, 1.06GB in total)

NTFS File System

Let’s start with NTFS. We’re going to examine the results of each test action for each pattern independently due to the abundance of data we have received. The first action is the creation of a set of files on the array.

We will take a look at the diagrams composed for the three most interesting patterns:

As we have expected, RAID 0 arrays show the best results here. We see that the obtained results are scalable depending on the number of HDDs in the array.

The write speed onto RAID 1 array is lower than that onto a single HDD, which we have seen in the previous tests. RAID 10 also didn’t strike us with any outstanding performance.

Let’s check out the read speed:

Files reading appeared a true disappointment: RAID 0 array made of many hard drives didn’t prove up to our expectations. RAID 0 array of two drives performed bets of all here.