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RAID 0 TESTING – QUICK BENCH
A new addition to our testing arsenal, QuickBench, is a fast and accurate program that provides both numerical and graphical results with a variety of file sizes. This one-size-fits-all bench works exceptionally well with hard drives.
Lets start by covering the results of the RAID 0 tests where we have four Caviar Black Drives configured in RAID 0. The results are consistent with expectations, as all four devices are connected via a single SATA port. It is important to remember that speed is not the only consideration here. Using RAID 0 will allow the user to configure this into one large drive that will not lose any of the available capacity, coming in at 1862.88 GB.
The user will trade off the data protection of RAID 5 when using RAID 0.
RAID 5 will result in a loss of some capacity of the array, as a portion of the drive will be dedicated to parity data which will allow data to be rebuilt in the event of a failure. This will bring the drives capacity in RAID 5 to 1397.16 GB, close to the capacity of one HDD. This is a tradeoff that the user will have to decide upon.
A click will bring both RAID 0 results up close for inspection. This view shows the throughput at different types of access, which is noted by the color of each line. The numbers across the bottom axis denote the size of the data files used for testing in each test.
This view gives a more accurate look at the hard numbers for the data contained in the above screen.
CRYSTAL DISK MARK
As a means of confirming our results with another benchmark, we will use Crystal Disk mark for the testing as well with RAID 0. Crystal Disk Mark is a nice and easy to use benchmark that allows the user to do several tests at different file sizes. The low speeds at 4k are to be expected, as HDD simply do not provide quite the kick of SSDs!
