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RAID 1 performance is not as big an issue and won’t be as spotlighted here because RAID 1 isn’t performance oriented. But it’s still important to know how much performance you will gain or lose when using that type of configuration.

RAID 1 Win98 & NT HDTACH

Win98 vs. NT RAID 1 WinBench Marks

Let’s start by looking at the RAID 1 HD TACH scores for both Windows 98 and Windows NT. You will notice that there is a performance hit that the system takes when using this type of RAID –and that’s to be expected! The Windows 98 marks are almost identical for the read portion of our test, coming in about 30 mb/sec –when compared to our single disk results. But notice the write marks are lower -almost 5 Meg a second lower –due to the load of simultaneous disk writes. And notice the CPU utilization also jumped from 41% all the way to 61%! But that’s the price you would pay for having data redundancy under Windows 98.

Let’s peer into the HDTACH NT scores. We see under Windows NT almost the same pattern as Windows 98 when using a RAID 1. The read rates stayed around the same as single disk marks being 30 Mb/sec –but those writes slowed to almost 13 Mb/sec, which is a 5 Mb/sec difference. And the CPU utilization jumped way up there –being almost comparable to Windows 98 and actually a little higher at 64%!

Not to sound too redundant –but the Winbench marks were very close to the HD TACH marks. They go something like this – 5540 thousand bytes /sec Business score over the 5300 seen with a single disk configuration (which was oddly lower). And High End disk marks were also very close, being 18000 RAID 1, and 18300 single disk.