Testbed and Methods

Testbed configuration:

• Intel SC5200 case;
• Intel SHG2 mainboard;
• Two Intel Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs (400MHz FSB);
• 2x512MB PC2100 ECC Registered DDR SDRAM;
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD;
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics;
• Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 4.

We tested the controller using WinBench 99 2.0 and IOMeter 2003.02.15.

We created one partition for the total storage capacity in WinBench 99. We carried out each of the WinBench tests seven times and chalked up the best result.

We used File Server and Web Server patterns in our IOMeter tests.

These patterns are intended for measuring the performance of the disk subsystem under a workload typical for 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 had the BIOS version 5033 and we used the driver version 1.0.0.3. For monitoring and synchronizing our RAID arrays we used the 3DM Disk Management utility. The controller was installed into a 133MHz PCI-X slot (although the controller itself only supports 66MHz PCI).

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

We enabled lazy writing for the disks of the arrays. We ran all the tests with 128KB of the BIOS memory.