SMB RAID for $49: Ciprico VST Pro

Benchmark Results

We used the P45 test system to compare the performance of the VST Pro 2008 software using the integrated ICH10R SATA ports and a RC5252-8 hardware controller card by Ciprico.

Access Time

As expected, access time does not differ very much on the RAIDCore card of the ICH10R. You will see a slight increase of access times on degraded RAID 5 arrays, though.

Interface Bandwidth

Interface bandwidth represents the maximum throughput of a RAID array when data can be fetched directly from the hard drives’ cache memory. Other caching mechanisms seem to improve the maximum throughput on RAID 5. It’s also interesting to watch the reduced maximum throughput on a degraded RAID 5, where stripe sets have to be restored on the fly. However, this benchmark does not have much effect on real life performance.