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For testing purposes we used the following machine configuration;

ABIT KA7 Motherboard with an Athlon 600 MHZ CPU (BIOS rev 8/9/2000) 128 Megs RAM 2- 20 gig IBM Deskstar DTLA 307020 Hard drives Intel AGP video (i740 chipset) AMI Hyperdisk controller (drive cache enabled) (Firmware 2.3)

The Hyperdisk was connected to the IBM Deskstar drives, one drive per channel –each in Master DMA MODE 5.

We used HDTACH 99 and ZDNet Winbench 99 for testing. We tested under both Windows 98se (FAT32) and Windows NT 4.0 sp6 (NTFS) platforms. Before we tested the RAID performance, we first tested the single disk performance –using only one Deskstar drive connected in performance mode via the Hyperdisk controller. Here are the results.

Win98 & NT Single Disk HDTACH

Single Disk WinBench '99

I didn’t include the CPU performance marks for each test in the charts so during the discussion of each mark I’ll give an overview of how well the CPU handled the load of the Hyperdisk.

Starting with the single disk comparison in Windows 98–we see a consistent 30Mb/sec average read rate at about 41% CPU. That seems like a high score but keep in mind HD TACH is more synthetic than other tests, and you can see it was also hitting bursts of up to 75 Mb/sec. The same tests under Windows NT yielded almost the same results, only with 22% CPU utilization –which was an improvement made via the OS. However under Winbench we see entirely different marks –as Winbench comes closer to real world performance. Windows 98 marks are more like 770 Thousand bytes /sec in Business marks and 7390 Thousand bytes /sec in High End marks. Of course the Windows NT marks were higher –mainly because of the NTFS file system. Business marks for Windows NT single disk were 5300 Thousand bytes / sec Business and 18300 High End.

Now lets compare those marks to the Performance oriented RAID 0 configuration marks of the Hyperdisk controller.

In Windows 98 we see only a slight jump with the HDTACH marks over single disk performance, going from 30 Mb/sec to 38 Mb/sec; and the same results under Windows NT. We were not dazzled with these marks, even though another 8 Mb/sec can speed things up quite a bit within the system, it’s not the performance gain we were hoping to see –especially when considering the expense of buying an extra drive just for the purpose.