Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• 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 Intel IOMeter 2003.02.15.

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

We used FileServer and WebServer patterns in our Intel 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 was installed into the PCI-X/133MHz slot and had the BIOS version 6033. For our testing we used the driver version 1.0.0.2.

WD740GD (Raptor) hard disk drives were installed into the rails of the SC5200 system case and fastened at the bottom with four screws.