System Setup and Notes
System Setup
Here's a rundown of the relevant specs of the test system:
| Motherboard: | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe - 1011.002 BIOS |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester |
| Memory: | 2x 512MiB Corsair XMS3200XL |
| Graphics: | XFX GeForce 6800 GT 256MiB |
| Boot Drive: | Maxtor 200GB IDE |
| Array Drives: | Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA |
| Operating System: | Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 |
Benchmark Software
For benchmarking the RAID arrays I am using two applications. The first is Simpli Software's HDTach, which tests CPU usage, burst speeds and sustained read/write rates. I enabled write tests and used "Long Bench" mode for the tests.
The second application the RAID arrays had to face was IOMeter. Formerly developed by Intel and now Open Source, IOMeter can simulate various data intensive situations, testing various aspects of a system, including networking and storage subsystems. For the purposes of this review, I configured read and write throughput tests by setting up a 100% sequential throughput benchmark using 512KiB transaction length. I also obtained a configuration set from our technical editor, Rys, designed to simulate workstation loads, using I/O queue lengths of 1 and 256. This test was run with the intention of seeing how good the response time of cards is under load, particularly with large queue lengths.
Notes
The cards on test here are both PCI solutions. In this case the 32bit/33MHz bus is only capable of 133MiB/s transfer rate. Given the Raptor drives on test here, it is likely that the PCI bus is going to be saturated. The Revo 64 is listed supporting 66MHz PCI interfaces, but with no such capabilities on this motherboard the card is stuck with 33MHz. Neither Promise nor XFX offer PCIe versions of their SATA RAID cards, although HEXUS has been told that a PCIe version of the Revo 64 should be available around September time.
To throw something of a spanner into the works, I have thrown in some benchmarks of the NVIDIA SATA RAID controller, running the three Raptor drives in RAID0. Sat on the chipset, this controller doesn't have the 133MiB/s restriction, and should get your juices flowing when you see the throughput that can be achieved.
It is important to remember that while we're comparing the XFX card with the Promise card, the Revo 64 is aimed at gamers, audio pros and SOHO applications, whereas the FastTrack SX4 is more a workstation/server solution, so how they perform in certain tests may reflect this.
