Test System
We picked a test system that would provide large reserves to power high-performance RAID arrays. Although the company has disappeared, we picked an IWill dual Opteron motherboard, because it offers both PCI-X and PCI Express slots. The DK88 is based on the nForce 4 Professional chipset from Nvidia, and comes with everything a server/workstation board requires: dual Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet with TCP/IP offloading; integrated ATI graphics and basic USB 2.0; and both UltraATA/133 and SATA/300 connectivity. This motherboard offers eight DDR400 DIMM sockets per processor socket, allowing for up to 64 GB of registered ECC memory. We equipped the platform with only 2 GB of RAM, since our storage benchmarks are not very resource hungry. We used an Opteron 875 dual core processor at 2.2 GHz to provide decent CPU performance, although a single core CPU at half the clock speed would probably have been fast enough.
