WinBench 99

High-End Disk Playback : AVS/Express 3.4

Here's the first High-End Disk Playback test running AVS/Express 3.4 :

AVS (Application Visual Software) provides a 3D, multi-platform data visualization environment. AVS incorporates both traditional visualization tools, such as 2D plots and graphs and image processing as well as advanced tools such as 3D interactive rendering and volume visualization.

AVS contains the following subcomponents :-

• the Data Viewer: point & Click Data Visualization
• the Network Editor: Develop Data Visualization programs
• the Geometry Viewer: Interactive 3D Geometry Display
• the Image Viewer: Interactive 2D Image Display
• the Graph Viewer: Line/Bar/Scatter/Area/Contour Plots
• Advanced Techniques: Image Processing, Volume Rendering, Scalar and Vector Techniques, Finite Element Data
• Presentation: High Quality Hardcopy and Animation

From the description, it seems that while AVS requires a lot of processing power, it does not really stress the disk subsystem, unlike the likes of 3D Studio Max that might require hundreds of megabytes of bitmaps and animations. On the other hand, it seems that most things are done in real time...

Well, I could be downright wrong here because I've never used AVS before. So, if I'm wrong, will someone please correct me and I'll edit this section accordingly. :)

Anyway, this could explain why Hardware Span seemed to be the fastest configuration compared to any of the RAID setups. Even RAID 1 (Mirroring) didn't take a significant hit. This could only mean that there wasn't as many writes as reads in the test.

It's all rather logical. I mean, do you save your file as many times as your application reads from the hard disk drive? As we have pointed out earlier also, the RAID 0 setup with the 64 KB stripe size performed rather badly in this test. So, it isn't such a bad idea to implement Mirroring as its performance didn't suffer as much as we thought.

High-End Disk Playback : FrontPage 98

Ah... Everyone should know what FrontPage is, so let's analyze the results without further ado. Now, while RAID 0 with the stripe size of 512 KB is the best performing setup, mirroring and hardware spanning isn't really that far behind, coming in second place.

Yet again, we see a rather contradicting result from our expectations of a RAID setup. Furthermore, the performance difference between a spanned array and a normal single drive is rather weird because from what we know, a spanned array has no real performance advantage over a normal single drive.

Again, we do not see the performance advantage of RAID 0 as we have expected. In fact, these results seem to make Mirroring look like a pretty darn good option! Then again, FrontPage isn't a really disk-intensive application and therefore is not a good example with which to test RAID 0's performance advantage.

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