New LSI 9200 series controllers: 6Gb/s, 2.88 GB/s seq. reads, 1.87 GB/s seq. writes

[chinobino]

Hey Tiltevros,

I was looking at your CrystalDiskMark 2.2 sequential read performance of 181.9 MB/s thinking, '4 drives only giving 2 drives worth of performance!'

Then I saw your result of 307.5 MB/s for CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Beta 1 - it looks likes they've fixed a bug

Downloaded CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Beta 1 and ran it on the 780i using Windows 7 x64 and 4 x 80 GB Intel x25-m's (G2's, firmware = 02G9) in RAID0 [edit]128k stripe (software RAID, OS drive);

---------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 Beta1 (C) 2007-2009 hiyohiyo
                   Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
---------------------------------------------------------------

           Sequential Read :  699.984 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  304.597 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :  508.305 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :  282.222 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :   21.263 MB/s [  5191.2 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :   49.615 MB/s [ 12113.1 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   79.148 MB/s [ 19323.3 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :  109.260 MB/s [ 26674.9 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [C: Used 61.0% (181.8/298.0 GB)]
  Date : 2009/12/03 20:10:58
    OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

You can really see the cache kick in hard on your LSI 9260i4 (you said LSI 9240i4 the 2nd time but I assume that was a typo) when reading & writing small files.

My main concern with using any PCI-e RAID card is the added latency to access times, particularly random access times, in which Intel SSD's are supposed to excel.

I ran HD Tune Pro 3.5's random access test and would be interested to compare the results to yours. I know the variability of the test makes a comparison pointless to a degree, I would just like a ball park comparison.



I am wondering if the LSI 9260i4 is only likely to show benefits (over software RAID) in sequencial reading & writing - with access times being roughly the same?