09 February 2010
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"By pairing the two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA/150 hard drives in a RAID-0 volume, we have shown that there are some potentially large performance increases to be gained that even out-perform some of the fastest SCSI hard drives and double the performance when compared to a single SATA hard drive (The best result overall, in terms of out-performing the single SATA hard drive, was 51.8 Mb/s faster)..."
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Article ©2004 Modtown
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 380GB SATA RAID-0 Stripset
Introduction:
Having recently reviewed and shown that the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA/150
hard drive is a great performer, we decided to source a second and identical
hard drive for further testing of a different nature...
Using Intel's ICH5R RAID Chipset on the excellent DFI LanParty PRO875
Motherboard, we aim to demonstrate the power of using two Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA/150 drives in a RAID-0 Stripset... Giving us a huge
total of 380GB of data storage space and increased transfer rates!
Those looking for the review of the single SATA hard drive, please click here.
What is RAID-0 (striping)?
RAID-0 leverages the read/write capabilities of two or more hard drives working
in unison to maximize the storage performance of a computer system. Data in a
RAID-0 volume is arranged into blocks that are interleaved among the disks so
that reads and writes can be performed in parallel.
This technique, known as "striping", is the fastest of all of the RAID levels,
especially for reading and writing large sequential files. Real world usage
models where RAID-0 can be of particular benefit include loading large files
into an image editing applications, saving large movie files in a video editing
application or creating CD or DVD images with a CD/DVD authoring package.
Parallel Data Blocks.
The hard drives in a RAID-0 volume
are combined to form one volume which appears as a single virtual drive to the
operating system. For example, two 40 GB hard drives in a RAID-0 array will
appear as a single 80 GB hard drive to the operating system.
No redundancy information is stored in a RAID-0 volume. This means that if one
hard drive fails, all data on both drives is lost... This lack of redundancy is
also reflected by the RAID level 0, which indicates no redundancy. RAID-0 is not
recommended for use in servers or other environments where data redundancy is a
primary goal.
We choose to use a RAID-0 Stripset as its biggest advantage over other RAID
levels, is high transfer rates. RAID-0 is typically used in desktops and
workstations for maximum performance for temporary data and high I/O rate.
Setting Up:
Setting up the SATA RAID volume was a simple process. It involved first
connecting the two 200GB SATA hard drives to the Motherboard SATA connectors and
power supply, installing the Intel ICH5R RAID Driver for Windows XP and
installing the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition software (a utility
used to configure and manage RAID on SATA drives) and rebooting the system.
At the POST screen, we then accessed the Intel RAID Configuration Utility, which
allows us to create the RAID volume on the system. This is extremely easy to use
program takes you through creating the RAID volume and was completed in four
steps:
;)
;)
;)
;)
Intel RAID for Serial ATA - RAID Configuration Utility...
A final step was to initialize and format the volume (to give it a drive letter, making it visible and usable) within Windows XP, using the Disk Management Tool, before conducting Benchmarks:
Computer Management - Disk Management Tool...
Benchmark Results:
To test the performance of this 360GB SATA RAID-0 Stripset, we will be using the popular
benchmarking packages PCMark 2002 and SiSoftware Sandra.
These programs will stress the SATA RAID-0 and simulate reading and writing of
data to the hard drives. The hard drives were connected directly to a SATA connectors on the
motherboard using a serial cable and powered using a SATA power adaptor. The
results can be seen below in graph form.
- CPU: Intel Pentium 2.53Ghz (N/W, 533FSB)
- Motherboard: DFI LanParty PRO875
- RAM: 1 x Crucial 512MB PC2700 DDRAM
- Comparison drive:
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA/150.
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