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SATA RAID CARD ROUNDUP
Introduction
RAID has always been a
clever way for enthusiasts and power users to attain
additional disk performance, data redundancy or both
by way of using multiple storage devices. We
are not going to elaborate on the various flavors of
RAID here, but rather examine the performance aspect
of a handful of hardware RAID cards available.
Check out
Wikipedia for a detailed description of
different RAID levels.
Hardware RAID cards have
their own processor on board which performs the
actual RAID calculations, directing data to and from
the correct disks, offloading the work from the
computer's CPU(s). But not all RAID cards are
created equal, as we shall see. Some have
on-board memory, others do not. Some make use
of the high-end PCI-X bus, while others have the
basic PCI-32 connector. And lastly, some of
these SATA RAID cards are not 'natively' SATA.
In other words, one can see from the circuit board
that there are PATA-SATA bridge chips, indicating
that the actual RAID processor is a PATA one.
But which ones perform, and which ones simply suck?
Only one way to find out...
The test bed used is
comprised of the following components:
The operating system is
Windows XP Professional SP2, 32-bit. All RAID
cards were tested using a PCI-X-133MHz slot.
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