The SuperTrak's RAID 4 Performance...
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Ziff Davis WinBench 99 under Windows 2000 Professional using NTFS - RAID 4
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| Benchmark |
SuperTrack-100 w/ 3 Drives |
SuperTrack-100 w/ 4 Drives |
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| Business Disk WinMark 99 (KB/sec) |
4010 |
4048 |
| High-End Disk WinMark 99 (KB/sec) |
9468 |
9510 |
| AVS/Express 3.4 (KB/sec) |
11520 |
11640 |
| FrontPage 98 (KB/sec) |
55040 |
55580 |
| MicroStation SE (KB/sec) |
14880 |
14880 |
| Photoshop 4.0 (KB/sec) |
4180 |
4164 |
| Premiere 4.2 (KB/sec) |
6792 |
6906 |
| Sound Forge 4.0 (KB/sec) |
12340 |
12460 |
| Visual C++ (KB/sec) |
10104 |
10024 |
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| Disk/Read Transfer Rate | StorageReview.com |
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| Beginning (KB/sec) |
19767 |
19767 |
| End (KB/sec) |
19800 |
19800 |
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| Disk Access Time (ms) |
16.22 |
16.18 |
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| Disk CPU Utilization (%) |
2.89 |
2.94 |
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Although RAID 4 yields better results, they're still quite disappointing. The High-End Disk Winmark issue mentioned above was present, as evidenced by the low High-End scores. Thus, we cannot use the High-End scores to judge the SuperTrak's RAID 4 performance.
Once again, however, the Business Diskmark scores are likely representative - and they continue to disappoint. We expected much more out of this card.
WinBench Dilemna...
Considering the multitude of problems with the WinBench Disk Winmark scores presented here, one may wonder why we bothered publishing them at all. Fact is, we seriously considered omission. However, this likely would not have gone over too well with most readers; as a result, we decided to publish while explaining why we're absolutely sure that they're unrepresentative. We then fell back on IOMeter to deliver an accurate performance measurement.
At this point, it's impossible to know what caused WinBench to act so strangely. It may be an issue with the cards, with WinBench, or perhaps both. WinBench may have serious issues benchmarking RAID arrays (especially ones with parity), but we've heard no complaints of such problems in the past. It may very well be these controllers; however, it seems unlikely that both cards would have such a similar issue with WinBench. Whatever the issue, keep in mind that these problems were repeatable on two completely different systems.
The SuperTrak's RAID 3 IOMeter Performance...
