SATA Spells Trouble for SCSI RAID: Five Controllers Put to the Test

Test Setup

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System Hardware
Processor(s) 2x Intel Xeon Processor (Nocona core)3.6 GHz, FSB800, 1 MB L2 Cache
Platform Asus NCL-DS (Socket 604)Intel E7520 Chipset, BIOS 1005
RAM Corsair CM72DD512AR-400 (DDR2-400 ECC, reg.)2x 512 MB, CL3-3-3-10 Timings
System Hard Drive Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB120 GB, 7,200 RPM, 8 MB Cache, UltraATA/100
Mass Storage Controller(s) Intel 82801EB UltraATA/100 Controller (ICH5)Silicon Image Sil3124, PCI-X
Networking Broadcom BCM5721 On-Board Gigabit Ethernet NIC
Graphics Card On-Board GraphicsATI RageXL, 8 MB
System Hardware
Performance Measurements c’t h2benchw 3.6
I/O Performance IOMeter 2003.05.10Fileserver-BenchmarkWebserver-BenchmarkDatabase-BenchmarkWorkstation-Benchmark
System Software & Drivers
OS Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition,Service Pack 1
Platform Driver Intel Chipset Installation Utility 7.0.0.1025
Graphics Driver Default Windows Graphics Driver

We used eight Seagate NL35 drives for benchmarking. These are based on 7200.8 technology, but validated for 24/7 operation, and support NCQ.Benchmark Results

Due to the lack of a serious benchmarking utility that would properly support either the large array size of 2 TB or RAID arrays in general, we decided to primarily focus on I/O performance.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.