Date:
Monday , July 06, 2009
Author:
Marc Adams
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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SSD RAID scaling under Windows 7

What can you expect when you get your new Windows 7 install working with those crisp new solid state hard drives? SSD drives are not what they used to be already. And just how is that Intel ICH10R chipset serving you?

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RocketRAID 4310 Throughput

To keep the comparison fair we set all RAID-0 configurations to the same 128 KB stripe size. Our particular card allows us to go as high as 1024 KB and we will also test to find out which gives us the highest throughput.

Some of the benefits of using a dedicated RAID card is less work for the CPU in addition more types of RAID (RAID 3, 5, and 6) and in some cases even network monitoring of your array. There are many benefits to choosing a dedicated RAID card over the integrated solution. Whether the features justify the cost is a personal question you have to ask yourself.

The RAID card we are using is the Highpoint RocketRAID 4310 which is a popular entry level card. I use the words entry level sparingly as even this ‘low-end’ card will set you back $400 without the SATA fan-out cable. Setting up the card is easy for anyone who has installed their own video card aka all you guys and once you set up your drives the way you want them you’ll be off and flying, or will you?

For this test we set the drives up in RAID-0 again using a four drive configuration, a three drive setup, a two drive setup and for good measure a single drive teat. We highly doubt anyone would spend all that money on a RAID card just to run one SSD off of it but we threw it in there just in case.

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Once again we see some excellent scaling with these drives but what concerns me most is the four drive configuration. It seems, at least in this case, the RAID card is only able to afford a small increase in bandwidth. With four drives running in RAID-0 our theoretical peak is closer to 800 MB/s but the RocketRAID 4310 is barely able to muster 700 MB/s.

I point this out because while 700 MB/s is nothing to laugh at, for the money spent on the card one should expect better performance at the top end.

We also see identical performance from all configurations of RAID-0 until we hit the 16 KB mark for data size. In essence we are more CPU bound by the card’s 800MHz Intel IOP348 than we were with our onboard solution.

To be fair, there is no RAID card that exists that is certified for use with SSDs but since many of you might be looking at one as an add-on we thought it important to include this data to help you with your purchase.

Let’s see how our write speeds hold up.

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Write speeds match what we saw with our read speeds save for the four drive setup. We got pretty erratic scores when we ran our tests and they were repeatable time and again. Neither a restart nor a rebuild of the array would fix this weird behavior.

In the end I was left pretty under whelmed by the RAID card and fairly satisfied that the integrated RAID solution works as well as it does. All the more reason to do your research when picking a component for your rig.

Here is where I would normally tell you that I tweaked the stripe size of the RAID-0 array and unlocked massive performance gains. The sad truth is that after hours of testing various stripe sizes it became apparent that the 128 KB setting was giving us the best performance. This may not be the case with every RAID card out there but it was with us today. For reference the Intel ICH10R allows stripe sizes up to and including 128 KB while the RocketRAID 4310 goes as high as 1024 KB.