System setup and testing notes
Stop! Hammer time, or system setup time...
| Component | Details |
|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon FX-55 Socket 939 |
| Motherboard | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe - BIOS 1017-004 |
| Memory | 2x 512MiB Corsair ValueSelect PC3200 |
| Graphics | ATI Radeon X1600 256MiB |
| Hard drives | Maxtor 6V250F0 250GB 3Gbps SATA Maxtor 6Y200P0 200GB IDE |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP2 |
| Host Disk controllers | NVIDIA nForce 4 SATA and IDE Silicon Image 3132 PCIe x1 for eSATA |
| Device bridges | Magic Bridge USB 2.0 Icy Box FireWire/USB2.0 |
For testing, we cloned the OS of our test system's SATA drive onto the IDE drive, allowing us to swap them around however we wanted while still having the system boot. To test data throughput we used our IOMeter suite of tests, described in the below table.
| Option/Test | Configuration |
|---|---|
| Outstanding I/Os | 10 |
| Individual test run time | 30 seconds |
| Read test access spec | 1MB transfers 100% sequential 100% read |
| Write test access spec | 1MB transfers 100% sequential 100% write |
| General usage access spec | 64KB transfers 50% sequential, 50% random 33% write, 67% read |
Tests were run on formatted partitions rather than unformatted disks. The IOMeter test file size was set to 1GB.
With an Icy Box on board for testing we're in a position to give IDE, SATA, eSATA, FireWire and two USB 2.0 results, making for quite a nice comparison.
