Test System:

Today we say goodbye to 32-bit Windows as we convert another system to Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. The new test system we'll be using today started out with the Antec Twelve Hundred case, then we put in an 850 watt power supply from PC Power & Cooling. For the motherboard, we have switched to the ultra high tech ASUS P5N64 WS Pro motherboard with the NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset, which comes standard with integrated Marvell SAS RAID. For the CPU we are using an Intel C2D E8400 processor and a HD 3870 video card from Sapphire. Here are the specifics:

For the bulk of the hard drive benchmarking I'll be using Hard Drive Tach. HD Tach has proven very reliable for us over the years and I like to stick with what works. The following tests will be conducted using the onboard Marvell SAS controller. I'll start out with one hard drive and work our way up to the two drives running in RAID 0.

Single Hard Drive Test
Hard Drive Tach - 8MB Zones

Right from the very first benchmark I knew the Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 hard drive was fast...and I mean FAST. That even includes our old SCSI 15K.3 Ultra 320 tests way back in April of 2003. Other than some minor experience with a Fiber Channel server, this data transfer demonstration is the fastest I have ever seen. And by the way, this is a single hard drive, not a RAID array. Let's press on to the single drive 32Mb zone benchmark.

Single Hard Drive Test
Hard Drive Tach - 32MB Zones

Switching to 32MB Zones we see the performance increasing to an incredible 186 MB/s burst, average read of 142 MB/s and an average write of 127 MB/s. Very impressive... 

Single Hard Drive Test
HD Tune: Read Only

I've never been a big fan of HD Tune, but even HD Tune shows some incredibly impressive numbers. In the benchmark above, HD Tune is showing us the minimum, maximum, and average hard transfer rate. It also shows hard drive access time, burst rate and CPU usage. On the single hard drive test, HD Tune shows the following information:

Page 1: Intro to SAS Page 2: SAS Details Page 2: 15K.6 Specs Page 3: Single Drive Tests Page 4: 15K.6 in RAID Page 5: ES.2 vs. 15K.6 Page 5: Conclusion