Testing:

The system in today's tests will be a build that started with the ASUS P5N64 WS Pro motherboard with the NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset. This motherboard comes standard with integrated SAS and SATA RAID. The P5N64 WS Pro isn't a great gaming board, but it's perfect for data storage tests because this board was designed for high end workstations.

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. However, I will include a few HD Tune benchmarks.

Single Hard Drive Test
HD Tach: Quick Bench / 8MB Zones

To establish a base line for the tests, we start out with a single Seagate hard drive. Immediately I can see a very sizable performance increase over the 1TB 7200.11. While I was never able to break the 90 MB/s mark in read or write with the 1 Terabyte drive, the 1.5 Terabyte drive blows past 90 and hits 106/110 MB/s. Very impressive...

Single Hard Drive Test
HD Tach: Long Bench / 32MB Zones

Next we test the drive with HD Tach by using the Long Benchmark. Once again we see very impressive numbers.

Single Hard Drive Test
HD Tune

Although I prefer HD Tach over HD Tune, HD Tune does provide some useful information. It even shows hard drive access time, burst rate and CPU usage. On the single hard drive test, HD Tune shows the following information: