WinBench 99

High-End Disk Playback : Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0

Microsoft Visual C++ is also quite disk-intensive, but not in the sense of having to deal with large file sizes. Rather, it has to deal with a LOT of files! As some of you would know, compiling a program usually consists of many separate files and libraries containing source codes for different parts and sections of a program.

So, RAID 0 was able to show its performance advantage. Generally, all the RAID 0 setups with large stripe sizes were able to produce the best performances, albeit not with a large margin over the other setups.

WinBench 99 Result Summary

This set of tests proved that theory is just theory, and real life performance is another thing altogether. Of course, this benchmark isn't really a real world test but a synthetic one. With that said, it's the closest that you can get to a real life test.

The test results show that there is simply no magical setup for everyone or every occasion. One setup maybe good for one application but not for another.

From what we can tell, it seems that disk-intensive applications seem to favor RAID 0 with large stripe sizes. Non disk-intensive applications, however, did not benefit from RAID 0's better performance. RAID 1 proved to be a worthy solution, especially for business applications in which its performance was quite acceptable.

In addition, we also saw how spanning could actually perform better than a single hard disk drive. Although that contradicts what we know about JBOD and spanning, it could be due to some sort of optimization in the RAID card although I highly doubt so.

We could also summarize that RAID 0 with a 64 KB stripe size is NOT a suitable setup for most cases as it did quite badly in most of the WinBench benchmarks.

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