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The Zif Davis Business Marks clearly show a decent performance gain when using the stripe set over a single disk. And in both Operating systems there is a slight performance hit when using the RAID 1.

The high end disk marks are also rather synthetic in nature, but they do show you a nice comparision of how well the card performed in a more stressful test. These marks show the exact same pattern as the other marks thus far. In both operationg systems the card proved that RAID 0 is the fastest, single disk is somewhat slower, and the Mirror takes the lowest marks –in order to provide fault tolerance.

So how about a more true test? The HD Tach suite is a less synthetic test by nature and should show us how this card would actually perform in a real world environment.

Starting with the Windows 98 HD tach scores –we see the exact same pattern as with the other tests suites. Only with this test, you actually see a bigger gap between the single disk, and RAID 0 configurations. From single disk setup to a RAID 0 there is almost a 8000 Kps difference in both read and write speeds. But you can also see in Windows 98 there is a CPU utilization hit, taking it from 14.6% when using a single disk to 35.9 % when using a stripe set. To follow this trend comes the RAID 1 configuration with a whopping 51.2 % of the processor chewed up! It appears also that the RAID 1 setup performs almost as fast as a single disk –but ouch, the CPU takes a serious hit!

HD Tach Win 98 Raid Single - click to enlarge

HD Tach Win 98 Raid 0 - click to enlarge

HD Tach Win 98 Mirror- click to enlarge