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U320 SCSI RAID CONTROLLER COMPARISON
Introduction
We all know SCSI is a
dying interface, giving way to new serialized
protocols such as SATA and SAS. SCSI had a
great long run, and technically, it is still sound
and strong. So why are we looking at RAID
controllers for an interface with a shrinking market
share? Well, because we are enthusiasts that
try to get the most bang for our buck. Yes,
used and surplus SCSI drives are getting cheaper on
places like eBay. So what better way to attain
maximum performance than with a RAID card?
The two major players
left in the SCSI RAID game are Adaptec and LSI.
We will look at three different cards, two of which
are from LSI. They differ in bus interface,
cache memory type, and of course, price and
performance.
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.
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