THG Pushes Broadcom's RAIDCore Storage Controller Envelope

The Bottom Line Is That There's No Faster Way

The results were very impressive: Up to 1.1 GB/s in RAID 0 and a maximum of about 1 GB/s in RAID 50 - those are results that have certainly raised the bar. However, it should be noted that magnetic data storage generated these impressive numbers.

Examining I/O performance is also interesting because, in the server environment, it is even more important than maximum transfer rates. In RAID 0, the test system generated about 2,000 I/O operations per second during the file server, database and workstation tests. To put this into perspective, individual drives notch about 150 I/O operations per second. Only during the Web server benchmark tests were the RAID 0's and RAID 50's performances close, as write operations are relatively rare.

Performance - especially in the I/O realm - will undoubtedly improve down the road, thanks to the use of more expensive hardware based on Ultra320 components. But that won't happen without massive effort, because for now, at least, no other RAID architecture can handle spanning.

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.