Testbed and Methods

The testbed was configured as follows:

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

We used the following benchmarking software:

• -  WinBench 99 2.0;
• -  Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15.

We created one partition for the total capacity of the array in WinBench 99. We ran WinBench tests seven times each and took the best result for further analysis.

We used FileServer and WebServer patterns in Intel IOMeter.

These patterns help to test the disk subsystem performance under a workload typical for file- and web-servers.

The Workstation pattern is created by Sergey GReY Romanov, our author, basing on the statistical data about the disk subsystem load as given in the SR Testbed 3 description. The statistical data are gathered for the NTFS5 file system 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 variable-size read/write requests and its performance in the Database pattern, which loads the disk subsystem with SQL-like requests.

Our controller had the firmware version 1.1.0.15 and we used the driver from the same pack (version 1.1.0.15). The 3DM Disk Management utility helped us control and synchronize the arrays. We installed the controller into a PCI-X/133MHz slot (although it only supports 32-bit/66MHz PCI at maximum).

WD360GD (Raptor) hard disk drives were installed into the rails of the SC5200 system case and fastened at the bottom.

The FastTRAK S150 SX4 controller can change the lazy write status for the hard disk drives by means of the exclusive PAM software. Thus, unlike with the 3ware 8506-8 Escalade controller (see our 3ware Escalade 8506-8 SATA RAID Controller Review for details), for example, we can definitely state that we enabled lazy write for the hard disk drives during the main test program, changing the driver’s caching mode (write-back or write-through) as needed. We performed all the tests using 256MB of cache memory.