SMB RAID for $49: Ciprico VST Pro

Transfer Rates

Read transfer rates were almost identical, and it did not matter whether we benchmarked the solution running only on the ICH10R, on the RAIDCore RC5252-8 card, or with drives running on both controllers. The maximum RAID 0 throughput is roughly 270 MB/s, while RAID 5 reaches approximately 245 MB/s. Performance on a degraded RAID 5 array was best on the ICH10R rather than on the RAIDCore hardware card.

The story is really different when looking at write throughput. If RAIDCore’s hardware controller RC5252-8 is used you will get excellent results. Please consider that these results include system caching, which we did not disable. However, it is very obvious that the VST Pro 2008 software is limited by Intel’s ICH10R write throughput, which suffers from a bottleneck. Eventually, this slows down VST Pro to a maximum write throughput of less than 130 MB/s using six hard drives, although roughly 280 MB/s is possible in RAID 5 using the RAIDCore card. This bottleneck only appears in RAID 0.