TREADLAYERS.COM: U320 SCSI HDD ROUNDUP

U320 SCSI HDD ROUNDUP

Introduction

For most of us, SCSI means high-end, workstation and server-grade storage. And that also means, expensive but extremely reliable and very long MTBF times, usually in excess of 1 million hours. 10,000 and 15,000 RPM hard disks and PCI-X 64-bit controllers are commonplace in this arena, but new technologies such as SATA and SATA-II are threatening to overthrow SCSI in performance.

Here, we are going to examine the latest Ultra320 SCSI HDD offerings from the major drive manufacturers, and their respective two-drive performance in RAID_0 and RAID_1 using hardware RAID. Lastly, we shall compare those results with that of Windows XP software RAID.

The testbed used is comprised of the following components:

Motherboard Asus PVL-D

CPUs Intel Paxville Xeon 2.8GHz , x 2

Memory Apacer PC2-3200 DDR2-400 1GB

Power Supplies PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 850W SSI

Boot HDD Seagate Barracuda 40GB

Cooling Spire Cooler Verticool

Video Card ATI Rage XL on the motherboard

The operating system is Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition.

For the hardware RAID tests, we used the built-in Adaptec Host Raid function of the PVL-D:


	Table Of Contents	Next: Fujitsu MAU3073

	1. Introduction
	2. Fujitsu MAU3073
	3. Fujitsu MAX3147
	4. Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147
	5. Maxtor Atlas 15K II
	6. Seagate Cheetah 15K.4
	7. Seagate Cheetah 15K.5
	8. Performance Summary - Individual HDDs
	9. Performance Summary - Host Raid, RAID_0
	10. Performance Summary - Host Raid, RAID_1
	11. Performance Summary - Software Raid, RAID_0
	12. Conclusion