Testbed and Methods

Testbed configuration:

• Intel SC5200 system case
• Intel SHG2 mainboard
• Two Intel Xeon 2.8GHz/400FSB CPUs
• 2x512MB PC2100 ECC Registered DDR SDRAM
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics
• Windows 2000 Pro SP4

We used the following benchmarking software:

• Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15
• FC-Test v.1.0 build 13

We used FileServer and WebServer patterns in our Intel IOMeter tests.

These patterns are intended for measuring the performance of the disk subsystem under workload typical of file- and web- servers.

We also use the WorkStation pattern, created by Sergey Romanov (a.k.a. GReY). It is based on the statistical data about the disk subsystem workload as given in the StorageReview Testbed 3 description . The statistical data for the NTFS5 file system are gathered in three operational modes: Office, Hi-End and Boot-up.

This pattern shows how well the controller performs in a typical Windows environment.

Lastly, we checked out the controller’s ability to process sequential read/write requests of variable size and its performance in the DataBase pattern, which loads the disk subsystem with SQL-like requests.

Our controller was tested with the firmware version 2.00.0.31 and driver version 1.00.0.36. The controller was installed into the PCI-X/133MHz slot (although it only supports PCI64 66MHz). WD740GD (Raptor) hard disk drives were installed into the rails of the SC5200 system case and fastened at the bottom with four screws.