Although more will follow, here’s a quick glimpse of what a cheap, but quality hardware raid solution can do with cheap, and large SATA drives in Raid 5. Keep in mind that the Perc 5/i uses the old IOP333 CPU clocked at 500MHz. Many current 3 series Adaptec products, for example, utilize the IOP333 at 800MHz. Also, one should note that there are reports that the IOP348 has some issues with SATA drives making the below representative of very inexpensive ($1000) raid arrays with huge capacities.
Raid 0 with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives with a Dell Perc 5/i 1MB stripe
Raid 5 with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives with a Dell Perc 5/i 256kb stripe
Raid 50 with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives with a Dell Perc 5/i
Tested on:
Core i7 920 (stock clocks/ watercooled)
12GB Patriot DDR3 1600
Gigabyte X58
EVGA GTX285 1GB SLI
Corsair 1kw power supply
Dell Perc 5/i 512MB with Battery Back-up installed
Vista Ultimate x64
This is a significant improvement to onboard integrated Raid on consumer level motherboards, and the cards sell for about $120 on ebay, with battery back up units.
These drives are now on an Adaptec 31605 in a WHS box. More information to follow.
Related posts:
- Dell Perc 5/i Raid Controller: Cheap Raid 5
- 7200.11 1.5TB on ICH10R in Raid 1
- 3x Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 Raid 5, Adaptec 3085
- Windows Dynamic Disk RAID 0 versus Intel ICH10R RAID 0 with Intel X25-M G2 80GB
- Differences between Hardware RAID, HBAs, and Software RAID
- Mixing 7,200rpm and 5,400rpm “Green” hard drives in RAID 0
The reason you are seeing such great results is that you are still operating almost exclusively in the cache on the card. Now try increasing the “Total Length” to something greater than the 512MB cache and you should see some a significant difference. Don’t get me wrong this card offers a lot of bang for the buck. This is why I just ordered one today. Try benchmarking with the cache off and then on. That will tell show you clearly what the cache is doing for you.