Crystal Diskmark
Rather than flooding you with about 20 screenshots, we have compiled the results of the different setups into a few bar graphs so you can quickly compare the results of the different RAID and none-RAID setups.
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The 4K read was the only benchmark that threw us for a loop on the scores and haven’t come up with an explanation as to why these scores are so high. The rest of the results were quite interesting at the Adaptec 6805E card did record the fastest scores with dual or quad drives in a stripe. The HDD used were quite large in the storage space area, but we only dealt with 2TB partitions while doing the bench marks. These HDD are presently priced outside the price range of common home user, but putting up nearly the same scores with a 500GB drive as oppose to a 2TB, you could possible afford a RAID setup that puts up really good scores as far as access times and MB/s to a solid state and still have ten times the storage capacity of a solid state. So one thought is you could purchase one solid state drive for your OS, two 500GB drives and a 5805E and configure the two drives in a stripe in install your game on there. This would give you the best speed for your OS and the disk space and near solid state speeds for your games. The last thing to come up with is potentially a two drive mirror to keep the data you don’t want to lose. This mirror array would be data you wouldn’t need low access times or are access frequently so storage space would be necessary and being a mirror you would need two of these drives b/c you will only have the space of one of the drives. This is all just conceptual ideas of course.
If your looking for the scores that made the graphs above, we have posted them for you below:
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We are using the 6805E controller in a VMWare development setup and it is a reasonably good controller. It would benefit from a bigger cache and the ability to use an SSD for further caching. These are features of other controllers with a considerably bigger price tag though. As it is, the controller does very well on not too random work loads but on purely random IO (like some SQL tasks), it only delivers about 13 mb/s on an otherwise lightly loaded RAID 10 setup. That is not too good. If you are not using VMWare but maybe some Linux setup, you can add your own SSD caching via flashcache (https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/). With a setup like that, you get both redundancy and great performance. On the whole, the controller is certainly preferable to on board SW RAID solutions and such but it could be a lot better too.