OUR TESTING METHODS
Every aspect of our experiment had to be considered in order to ensure meaningful resultsMEET THE TEST SUBJECTS
Our sample population of controllers covers every price point and feature setThe Controllers
To test the performance of motherboard-based RAID controllers
we turned to Nvidia’s nForce 680i chipset and Intel’s P35 chipset.
The former represents the typical testing environment we use for
all our storage benchmarking and is a solid example of what you’d
fi nd on a high-end motherboard. The Intel-based board provides a
fair representation of RAID performance on a midrange machine.
Given Intel’s dominance in the performance-computing market
right now, we didn’t bother testing an AMD-compatible mother-
board. What’s the point?
For our controller cards, we picked a combination of host-based
and discrete models: With the former, the controller uses the rig’s
processor to handle RAID functionality (just as a motherboard chip-
set does), while discrete controllers remove your computer from the
equation by supporting a low-powered processor right on the card.
As you might expect, host-based controllers are cheaper than their
discrete counterparts. Besides selecting controllers for both card
types, we also sought to vary the price points in each category.The Test Bed
All the testing, save that done on the MSI P35 Neo2-FR motherboard,
was conducted using our standard storage benchmarking system:
an Intel Q6700 on an EVGA nForce 680i motherboard, a single EVGA
GeForce 8800 GTX videocard, and a single 500GB Western Digital
Caviar SE16 hosting the Windows XP operating system. Each RAID
test uses four Western Digital 150GB Raptor drives.
We elected to use two RAID confi gurations for benchmarking:
RAID 0 (aka striped) and RAID 5. This allowed us to study the price/performance equation from two different mindsets: speed and
redundancy. As we noted in our previous RAID feature, you won’t
fi nd a faster storage confi guration than RAID 0, in which the drives
serve as one volume and your data is written and read across them
concurrently. A RAID 5 setup balances the performance gains of
striped arrays yet still offers a degree of data redundancy.The Benchmarks
We’re using the same standard suite of benchmarks we normally
use for storage testing, with a few changes. We’ve downgraded
our HD Tach program to version 3.0.1.0 to ensure we can run
both read and write tests on the arrays. This synthetic benchmark
bypasses any software on a machine to get right to the drives
themselves, measuring the subject’s maximum potential.
For a more real-world test, we’re using PCMark05. We’ll com-
pare the scores from the program’s subset tests—XP Startup,
Application Loading, General Usage, Virus Scanning, and File
Writing—as well as the overall score given to each test subject.
Finally, we’ve created our own real-world benchmark to further
test these arrays under a typical usage scenario. We time how
long it takes to write a 1080p multimedia slideshow to the array
using Photodex’s ProShow, based on fi les read from the array,
while simultaneously using Adobe Premiere to convert a DVD rip
on the array into an uncompressed AVI fi le. As these tasks also
maximize our processor’s usage, it allows us to discern the poten-
tial performance pitfalls of a card that uses said processor for its
RAID calculations.44 MAXIMUMPC | MAY 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
HOST-BASED/
MOTHERBOARD
EVGA nForce 680i
This motherboard, chosen
for the 2007 Maximum PC
Dream Machine, comes with
support for up to six SATA
devices. But it’s not just the
potential size of the RAID
that gets us going. The moth-
erboard also provides a decent list of confi gurations to choose from:
RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD (just a bunch of disks). It’s a surprisingly
generous offering, given the fact that some of the add-in cards we’re
testing lack such variety.
Setting up the RAID itself is a breeze—you switch the SATA ports
to RAID in the BIOS and then use a handy utility to select the drives,
array type, and confi guration options you want.
$300, http://www.evga.comHOST-BASED/
MOTHERBOARD
MSI P35 Neo2-FR
MSI’s P35 Neo2-FR is
a respectable midrange
motherboard that sports
the fl ashin’ new Intel P35
chipset with an ICH9R
south bridge. We expect
RAID performance with this
chipset to rival that of EVGA’s nForce platform, which is an older
chipset stuffed onto a more high-end motherboard.
You get only fi ve SATA ports on the P35 Neo2-FR: Four
operate under the ICH9R chipset, with one running on an
integrated Marvell 88SE6111 controller. This could have some
bearing on performance when compared to the EVGA nForce
680i, which uses the south bridge for all six SATA ports.
$120, http://www.msicomputer.comMAXIMUMPC
CHALLENGEANOTHER