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SAS RAID CONTROLLER COMPARISON
Introduction
SAS is a new interface
similar to SATA, wherein the SCSI protocol is
communicated through a serial interface. The
cables are the same, but the connectors are slightly
different. The immediate benefit of SAS is the
reduction of cable clutter, and the simpler
connectivity both internally and externally.
Click on the logo above for more info on SAS in
Wikipedia.
We recently published an
article showing the differences between several
SATA-II/SAS controllers when mated with 8x Seagate
Barracuda ES SATA-II HDDs. But here, we
will be using SAS HDDs instead.
The testbed used is
comprised of the following components:
The operating system is
Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition.
Because we are testing
only with 2 HDDs, we will examine RAID-0, RAID-1,
and software RAID-0 performance. RAID-0 will
be tested using the smallest and largest stripe
sizes allowed by the controller. Software
RAID-0 is the "disk striping" option when creating a
new logical drive using two (or more) dynamic
drives. The RAID controller is essentially
used in JBOD mode.
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