home | reviews | articles | price crusher | spotlight | case gallery | the team | forum

08 September 2010 

1 | 2 

difficulty rating:
- n/a

article by:
- inder

related www:
- forum thread



"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)..."



modtown takes no responsibility for any damages incurred from instructions within any of the articles on the site!

this includes loss of warranties or damage to your equipment and/or systems...

and any other negative outcome that may occur due to inaccuracies or poor implementation of the guide on the readers part.
 
if in doubt - don't do it, be smart and safe!

Article ©2004 Modtown

- PCMark 2002: Results

The first Benchmark result shows that coupling the two Maxtor SATA's in a RAID volume definitely increases performance - by almost twice as much...

Our fastest result here was 109.9 Mb/s which was achieved in the Uncached File Write test. This result is 51.5 Mb/s faster compared to just a single SATA hard drive on a normal SATA connection. The best result overall, in terms of out-performing the single SATA hard drive, was achieved in the Uncached File Read test - a result that was 51.8 Mb/s faster.

- SiSoftware Sandra: Results

Once again, performance was almost twice as fast as a single SATA hard drive. The Buffered Read and Buffered Write tests were almost equal, but below the results of a single SATA hard drive - both tests were 5 Mb/s slower than a single SATA hard drive.

This is most likely due to the hard drives having 8MB cache memory on board and by combining them in a RAID volume, we still have a total of 8MB cache memory (i.e. it is not combined to form 16MB cache).

Better Performance?

The pairing of the two SATA drives has exhibited a large gain in performance, as shown in the benchmarks. But how does this compare to a PATA RAID volume or a single SCSI hard drive?

SiSoftware Sandra generates a 'drive index' value for the hard drive that has been tested. Using this value, we can compare the results to other hard drives and setups that are listed in the programs database of results. The SATA RAID volume gained a drive index of 73,491 kB/s.

- Comparisons:

Our first comparison is of a similar RAID-0 setup using two PATA hard drives (ATA100). Each drive has a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM and has 8MB cache memory. The drive index for this setup is: 42,520 kB/s. When using two hard drives with a smaller 2MB cache memory, the drive index is: 36,300 kB/s.

A single SCSI Ultra160 18GB hard drive, which boasts a rotational speed of 15,000 RPM and 8MB cache has a drive index of: 40,212 kB/s. The table below shows the sub-performance of these setups, when compared to the SATA RAID-0 in this article:

The closest drive setup, in terms of performance, was the SCSI Ultra320 147GB hard drive. Although this was still 26,531 kB/s slower than the SATA RAID-0...


Conclusion:

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).

With SCSI hard drives being a much more expensive investment, many times more than the price of a SATA hard drive, it seems as though SATA hard drives in a RAID volume could bring about much savings to an individual, along with great performance gains.

A SATA RAID-0 volume will create an effective hard drive setup that is suitable for power users (see 'What is RAID-0 (striping)?' above), all that is required is a minimum of two SATA hard drives and SATA connectivity on the user's motherboard. Many manufactures now incorporate SATA connectivity options in their motherboards plus with the increased awareness and availability of SATA hard drives - users now have a viable and cost effective option to consider and weigh as against SCSI before making a decision.

Those without SATA connectivity on their motherboard could always opt to install a PCI expansion card, which instantly provides two, four, eight, and even twelve SATA channels for connecting SATA hard drives.

However a slight disadvantage is that a RAID-0 volume has no redundancy information stored within it. Meaning that should one of the hard drives fail, all the data on both drives is lost... and 360GB of data is much to loose!

Therefore, this kind of setup may not be best suited for use in environments where data redundancy is a primary goal (i.e. a server). Those looking for maximum performance for temporary data will benifit the most from a RAID-0 SATA setup. Users who wish to have some kind of data redundancy, could use two SATA hard drives in a RAID-1 volume.

As the SATA Technology is still maturing, we can look forward to seeing even more performance gains (both in standalone and RAID volume's) as the Generation II and Generation III SATA drives hit the shelves - of course we will be putting those through their paces as they become available!

Why not discuss this article on the forums?

top 

©2005 Modtown. All Rights Reserved | Copyright Information | Contact Us