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Product Application:

Mainstream & Enterprise Storage
Product Provided by: Seagate

Available at:

Servers Direct

Estimated Online Price:

$699.99

Availability:

Q3 2008

Review by:

Scott

Edited by:

Paul

Review date:

7/11/2008
 

RAID 0 Testing

Now for my favorite part of hard drive testing; RAID!!! Yes, our friends over at Seagate sent over a pair of the Cheetah 15K.6 hard drives for our testing pleasure. And trust me, this is the most fun I've ever had benchmarking hard drives!

Using the onboard SAS RAID controller, we combined the hard drives using 64Kb stripe size. Running multiple hard drives dramatically increases the overall data transfer performance as you will soon see.

Striping (RAID 0)
When a disk array is striped, the read and write blocks of data are interleaved between the sectors of multiple drives (see Figure 11). Performance is increased, since the workload is balanced between drives (or "members") that form the array. Identical drives are recommended for performance as well as data storage efficiency.

The disk array’s data capacity is equal to the number of drive members multiplied by the smallest array member’s capacity. For example, one 100 GB and three 120 GB drives will form a 400 GB (4 x 100 GB) disk array instead of 460 GB. The stripe block size value can be set logically at 8KB, 16KB, 32KB, 64KB, and 128KB. This selection will directly affect performance. Larger block sizes are better for random disk access (like email, POS, or web servers), while smaller sizes are better for sequential access.

2x Hard Drive Test (RAID 0)
Hard Drive Tach - 8MB Zones

Burst Speed:

2235.2 MB/s

Average Read:

178.5 MB/s

Average Write:

567.9 MB/s

Isn't this the craziest hard drive benchmark you have ever seen? 2.2GB/s burst speed??? Can that be correct? I ran the 8MB Zone benchmark about a dozen times and each benchmark showed nearly identical results. The write speed is just crazy. The write speed bottoms out at around 90 MB/s and then blows the roof hitting over 1200 MB/s. I'm a little skeptical on these results and we are waiting for a confirmation back from Seagate. So until this, I can only assume these numbers are accurate.    

2x Hard Drive Test (RAID 0)
Hard Drive Tach - 32MB Zones

 

Burst Speed:

2256.7 MB/s

Average Read:

178.7 MB/s

Average Write:

160.2 MB/s

At 32MB Zones, the write speed benchmark smoothes out to something more believable, but the burst speed is still over 2.2 gigabytes per second. If these results are truly correct, this is the most amazing hard drive benchmark I have ever achieved on a desktop computer.

2x Hard Drive Test (RAID 0)
HD Tune: Read Only

 

Minimum Transfer Rate: 143.7 MB/s
Maximum Transfer Rate: 191.0 MB/s
Average Transfer Rate: 169.1 MB/s

Access Time:

5.6 ms
Burst Rate: 88.7 MB/s

CPU Usage:

6.3%

Switching back to HD Tune we see some very impressive numbers, but nothing like HD Tach's 8MB Zone bench. Even the burst rate is down. In fact the burst rate is slightly less than a single Cheetah 15K.6. Mixed results, not what I like to see. Regardless, the overall scores are extremely impressive.

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