Adaptec 2010S ZCR RAID with Seagate 10K.6 Performance
What I did so far was install windows XP in order to run benchmarks. I have tried using a variety of benchmarks such as Drivebench, Sandra, Atto and HDTach. I realize that Sandra/HDTach suck with Raid arrays for some reason, but Drivebench and Atto did not bring much relief.
My peak transfers are like this in Atto and Drivebench (+/- 3MB/s):
Read: 56 MB/s
Write: 77 MB/s
Considering that one 10K.6 drive can sustain about 70MB/s peak read, and a RAID5 array is striping 3 of them...I was hoping for at least 140-200MB/s peak reads.
At first I was getting even worse performance, about 20 MB/s read and 25 MB/s writes with atto or drivebench. I updated the 2010S to v1.62 firmware to get the higher scores.
My Windows XP installation has SP1 with dynamic drive enabled (as suggested by posts on various forums). Needless to say, this level of performance just blows. Now I have read a few posts indicating that "adaptec raid sucks" or "ZCR is total crap". AT this point, I would have to agree. ARe these performance figures due to the 2010S being crap, or is it a flaw of windows XP?
Can I get some feedback on a LOW PROFILE raid adapter which will exploit these drives to their fullest? It must fit into a 1U chassis, which means no megaraid 1600. I would like to hear some feedback about the MEGARAID 320-1 performance. I am expecting at least peak 200MB/s reads...which is perfectly within reason for this type of config. I understand that Raid5 writes are not spectactular, but 56MB/s peak is unacceptable.
Any feedback, suggestions or advice is GREATLY appreciated.
-= SsZERO =-
