X-bit labs

Promise FastTrak TX4300 Serial ATA RAID Controller Review (page 8)

Category: Storage

by Alexander Yuriev , Nikita Nikolaichev

[ 10/20/2005 | 04:09 PM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter WorkStation Pattern

Now let’s pass over to WorkStation pattern, which imitates active user work in various applications in NTFS5 file system:

As always here follows the graph showing the dependence of arrays performance on the requests queue depth:

The situation is pretty typical of RAID 0 arrays: the more HDDs are used to build the array, the faster it processes the requests. As for RAID 1 and RAID 10 arrays, they start off with the speeds close to those of RAID 0 arrays made of 2 and 4 HDDs respectively, but as the workload increases, they perform more like a single HDD and a RAID 0 array of 2 HDDs.

Let’s compare the performance of RAID arrays of different types. The ratings for the WorkStation pattern will be calculated according to the formula below:

Performance Rating = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32

RAID 0 arrays ranked themselves depending on the number of hard drives used. The performance of RAID 10 array appeared higher than that of RAID 0 array of 2 HDDs. A similar situation occurs between RAID 1 array and a single hard drive.