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SATA II and SAS RAID CARD ROUNDUP
Introduction
In 2006, we published an
article on the relative performance of several
popular SATA RAID cards. That article can still be
found
here. Some of those cards used parallel-ATA RAID
ASICs mated to SATA-PATA adapters, as well as older
PCI and PCI-X interfaces, all of which worked within
the SATA specification only. In this article,
we look at an updated crop of SATA-II and SAS RAID
cards, many of which are sporting newer PCI-Express
interfaces.
SATA-II and SAS are
similar but very different interfaces. They
use nearly the same connector, and are serialized
versions of legacy protocols. SATA-II is the
3.0 Gbps serialized version of the old PATA/UltraATA
interface, while SAS is the serialized version of
SCSI. Click on the logos above to read more
about these standards in Wikipedia.
The following shows the cards that were
tested:
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Adaptec 31605, SAS/SATA-II
-
Areca ARC-1220,
SATA-II
-
Areca ARC-1261ML,
SATA-II
-
Areca ARC-1680, SAS/SATA-II
-
Highpoint HPT-1820A, SATA-I
(best performer from previous article for
comparison)
-
LSI 8708ELP, SAS/SATA-II
-
LSI 8888ELP, SAS/SATA-II
-
Promise EX16300,
SATA-II
The testbed is as
follows:
-
Tyan S2696
-
2x Intel Xeon 5160
3.0GHz
-
Apacer 8GB DDR2 FB-DIMMs
Quad-Channel
-
Asus X1600XT Silent
-
Verax X21 Coolers
-
8x Seagate Barracuda
ES 750GB
-
Windows XP
Professional 64-bit Edition
For the most part, we
will be testing RAID-0, 1, and 5 levels.
RAID-6 is supported by most of the cards too. If
other RAID levels are supported, such as RAID-3, 10,
50 and 60, those were tested as well. JBOD is
also tested through configuring all drives as a
striped array, or Windows software-based RAID-0.
Please note that some images may erroneously state
that "8x" drives are used in RAID-1 tests.
Only two drives are utilized in a RAID-1 array.
Workstation use is relevant to us, so
we use single-user benchmarks such as HDTach 3.0 and
ATTO Benchmark, both reliable and familiar to many
readers. Default settings are used, except for
adjustable stripe sizes. We test using both
the smallest and largest stripe sizes available in
order to determine performance on either end of that
range. For some cards, stripe size was still a
variable setting for RAID-1 and JBOD arrays, which
do not make sense. In those cases, default
settings were used.
Because half of these
RAID cards support SAS, an update to this article
will be published using SAS HDDs.
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