RAID Scaling Charts, Part 2

Page 4 of 9:

Test Setup

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System Hardware
Processor	AMD Opteron 875 (Egypt 90 nm, 2.2 GHz, 2x2 MB L2 Cache)
Motherboard	Iwill DK88 Dual Opteron BoardChipset: Nvidia nForce Professional 2200, BIOS: 1.4
Common Hardware
RAM	2x 1024 MB DDR-400 (CL 3.0-3-3-8)Micron 18VDDF12872G-40BD3
Graphics Card	ATI RagelXL
System Hard Drive	120 GB 7,200 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/300Samsung HD120IJ
Benchmark Hard Drives	8x 320 GB 7,200 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/300Samsung HD321KJ
RAID Controller	Areca ARC-1220 8-Port PCIe RAID6-ControllerFirmware V1.43 2007-4-17
DVD-ROM	Teac DV-W50D
Software
ATI Graphic	Windows integrated
Nvidia nForce Professional	Version: 6.70
OS	Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Build 3790 SP2

Hardware PCIe RAID Controller: Areca ARC-1220

IWill DK88 Opteron Motherboard

Click to enlarge Iwill-DK88-boardbig.jpg

Although IWill has gone out of business, we decided to use one of its server motherboards for this project. The DK88 is based on Nvidia’s nForce Professional chipset and it offers both PCI Express and PCI-X slots.

AMD Opteron 875

We still had a dual-core Opteron 875 in our shelves and decided to use this one for this project. Since we used a RAID controller with an on-board XOR unit, such a powerful processor would not have been necessary. However, we decided to avoid any possibility of creating a bottleneck.