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Performance
I didn't compare the FastTrak100's performance with
those of another RAID controller because there's little or no
performance difference between RAID controllers of this class. This
is because none of these budget RAID cards use dedicated processors
to process the computations required by RAID 0, 1, and 0 + 1. So,
all that these cards are doing is provide the necessary BIOS and
software support to make the RAID array bootable. We shall compare
software and hardware RAID to see what are the differences between
the two.
To test the performance of various RAID setups, I
used HD Tach ver. 2.61, SisSandra Disk Benchmark and WinBench. And
here are the specifications of my system :-
| Processor |
600MHz Intel
Celeron II
o/c to 810MHz @ 90MHz FSB |
| Motherboard |
ABIT BF6 |
| System Disk (C:) |
15GB Maxtor
DiamondMax Plus 40
- ATA/66, 7200rpm |
| RAID Array Disks |
20GB Maxtor
DiamondMax Plus 60 x 2
- ATA/100, 7200rpm |
| Sound Card |
Creative Labs
Sound Blaster 32 ISA |
Hard disk used in the RAID array
tests
The following RAID setups were used for all the tests :-
- Normal (No RAID)
- Software Span
- Hardware Span (JBOD)
- Mirror (RAID 0)
- Software Stripe (RAID 1)
- Hardware Stripe (RAID 1) with stripe sizes (KB) of 2, 4,
8, 16, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024
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