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DATABASE
WORKSTATION
PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE
In PCMark Vantage the data simply cannot be manipulated, and a result is provided based on the transfer speeds observed in eight simulated user activities. This is also a widely accepted opinion held by many reviewers and storage enthusiasts.
Through Vantage, the user gains large benefits in the write-back feature of the RAID card as the card holds the writes in the cache until the devices are not busy. This benchmark uses both mixed read/write tests and is a good test for overall performance.
There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:
- Windows Defender In Use
- Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
- Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
- Starting the Vista Operating System
- Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
- Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
- Cataloging a music library
- Starting applications
LSI 9265-8i RAID CONTROLLER VANTAGE TEST RESULTS
The 9265-8i results in the HDD tests were not quite as good as previously tested RAID cardsthat have larger caches. We do not feel that this representation is entirely fair, however, as the sample controller only has 512 mb of cache on board while the retail version lists with 1 GB of DDR3. This will definitely make a difference in achievable benchmark results with the controller.
We hope to test the LSI 9265-8i with the expanded cache soon in order to see the difference in scores. I did bench this HDD test with write back enabled to use the cache to help with this very write intensive benchmark. There are a multitude of different settings and with different strip sizes the results will vary. Uunfortunately we did not have the time to test at all of them but here are the results from the recommended FastPath settings.
HDD Suite Score: 87621 – https://3dmark.com/pcmv/429465
LINKED INDEX
INTRODUCTION ~ EXTERNAL CHARACTERISTICS ~ BENCHMARK PREP
ATTO/CRYSTAL ~ AS SSD ~ HDTUNE PRO ~ WEI/AIDA ~ IOMETER
PASSMARK ~ VANTAGE ~ CONCLUSIONS AND THOUGHTS
If you want more detailed information on the testing, parameters and configurations used in testing, feel free to hit the forums! I will be happy to answer any questions, and as long as I have the hardware, if there is anything I have missed, I would be happy to run some tests for you and there will also be some more detailed presentations on 4k scaling for you enthusiasts out there 🙂 ~ Paul