Testing RAID Performance

The performance testing was done using only the Promise FastTrak100 ATA RAID Adapter. There is little or no performance difference between RAID controllers of this class. This is because none of these budget RAID cards or even integrated RAID controller use dedicated processors to process the computations required by RAID 0, 1, and 0 + 1.

All that these cards do is provide the necessary BIOS and software support to make the RAID array bootable. We will compare software and hardware RAID to show you the differences between the two options. The performance difference between PATA and SATA hard disk drives in RAID was not tested as it was not within the scope of this guide.

To test the performance of various RAID setups, we used HD Tach ver. 2.61, SisSandra Disk Benchmark and WinBench 99. Here are the specifications of the testbed :

The following RAID setups were used for all the tests :-

1. Normal (No RAID)
2. Software Span
3. Hardware Span (JBOD)
4. Mirror (RAID 0)
5. Software Stripe (RAID 1)
6. Hardware Stripe (RAID 1) with stripe sizes (KB) of 2, 4, 8, 16, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024

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