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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 RAID 5 results are very encouraging in this subtest resulting in an all time high total point score of 83988 points.
- Test 1 – Windows Defender – 322.97 MB/s
- Test 2 – Gaming – 243.01 MB/s
- Test 3 – Importing pictures to Windows Photo Gallery – 418.05 MB/s
- Test 4 – Windows Vista Startup – 410.74 MB/s
- Test 5 – Video editing using Windows Movie Maker 344.15 MB/s
- Test 6 – Windows Media Center – 1048.26 MB/s
- Test 7 – Adding music to Windows Media Player – 263.32 MB/s
- Test 8 – Application loading 429.15 MB/s
LINKED INDEX
Introduction ~ Test Bench & Protocol ~ Card Settings
RAID 5 Explained ~ Initial Tests ~ AS SSD
Good,quick review. The test rig could be cleaned up a little but thats just trivial and has no bearing on the outcome. As for the LSI card, they are decent performer but still have the appearence of being rough and raw. I would have liked to see the Cache as a DDR III SODIMM to allow users to change or upgrade rather than requiring expensive additions. As for the SSD’s, I feel this review would benefit from using several arrays including the excessively priced C300’s as well as SSD’s in the domestic areas. Also, I understand that the site is for SSD’s but using a mixture of SATA and SAS HDD’s for more comparison. The other area most hide away is the negitive effects of RAIDing SSD’s in respect of TRIM being lost. The only RAID that is supposed to support TRIM in RAID is Intel Matrix with version 9.xx software however, still buggy. It’s nice seing the high speeds but no good if the system is a mess after a month of use.
What is really missing here is the “real RAID5 performance figures” which are 4K Random Writes. Reads on a redundant RAID5 do not need to go through the RAID stack as soon as fastpath is installed. Sequential writes do but are basically an equiation of compute power and memory bandwidth. Same if you look on the LSI web page performance figures – all marketing figures that avoid what is really important on a typical Web or OLTP server. Additionally, I would want to see performance figures on a RAID5 in non redundant state and during rebuild as again, in that case the RAID stack matters.