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HighPoint RocketRAID 2640X4
Test System and Setup
Motherboard | Tyan Tomcat n3400B |
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Processor | AMD Opteron 1218 HE |
Memory | Corsair ValueSelect (2 x 1GB) DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) |
Chipset | nVIDIA nForce Pro 3400 |
Hard Disk Drive | Fujitsu 15k.5 SAS Drive (4x) |
Hard Disk Drive | Western Digital 1TB SATA Drive (4x) |
Graphics Card | nVIDIA GeForce 8600gs |
As the purpose of this review was to consider the use of SAS technology and SATA technology together in high end gaming systems, a wide variety of system configurations were considered.
- 4x Western Digital 1TB SATA
- RAID 0
- RAID 5
- 4x Fujitsu 15k SAS
- RAID 0
- RAID 5
- 2x of the above
- RAID 0 x2
Testing
4x Western Digital 1TB SATA
The first configuration that I tested was four Western Digital 1TB SATA drives in two different RAID configurations. Having lots of disk space is very important; especially when some games on the market have an install size of nearly 10 GB! After formatting, in RAID 0, these drives have a capacity of about 3.75 TB.
This is the largest array that I've personally had the chance to work with. The sheer size of these drives implies that the seek times will be much higher than the typical 500GB drive. The sequential read speed of 158.7 MB/s is on par with other 1TB drives in the industry. The random access speed of 14.78 is also on par.
Datamarck confirms the previous test results: 11ms seek time coupled with around 150 MB/s sequential read time. All in all, a 11.85ms seek time is not too terrible. Seek time controls how fast the disk can locate files on the disk. With this much data spread across only four disks, you really can't expect much better performance than this.
The Sandra read performance test shows one important feature of RAID0: the performance of the array is fairly uniform across the board. As this shows, the array blows the competition out of the water on long term read speeds.
The Sandra write test is where the RAID0 really starts kicking butt and taking names. It should be obvious from the position of that red line, that this array is an absolute monster when it comes to write speed.
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