Alright, I just finished a few quick benchmarks of my own. I have run each test a number of times and received the same results each time. I'll give a brief explanation of each attachment, then offer my conclusions below. When making comparisons between myself and Napalm, lets please try and stick to only HDTach results, as HD Tune does not work for me and the two are not directly comparable (at least not in my experience).
Oh, my results were achieved on an el-cheapo Promise TX2300 software driven add-on card. It is limited to the PCI bus it sits on, so burst rates aren't going to be anything fancy... but that's fine, it's not like ridiculously high burst rates do you anything with 16MB of cache on a SATA 1 bus anyway.
HDTach seems to work, but it's not without issues. For example, no matter how many times I uninstall/reinstall, I can't seem to save the benchmark files (wtf). Still, screenshots work, so.. yeah.
HDTune on the other hand is just plain out to lunch with this card... you'll see why. Clearly my results with it have to be thrown out.
The first attachment is an HDTach benchmark showing the results of one of my raptors (blue) versus a RAID-1 array with both of my raptors (red). The bench of my old raptor is quite old - early 2007 by the date - but I have no reason to believe the hard drive has deteriorated any since then (apparently I still had an HD Tach file on this old computer with a few benches in it... convenient considering I can't save them now!). The new RAID-1 benchmark, it should be noted, is actually the worst I saw. The read times remained constant to within .1MB/s, but the access time on this one is higher by .1-.2ms. I can't say whether anyone else's results were their best or worst though, so I'm assuming they were the worst for comparisons sake. If not, let me know.
The second/third attachments are two runs of HD Tune. Things don't look too crazy on it until you notice the CPU utilizations... over 50%. I'm sure some of you want to jump on that and yell "SEE!"... but then I'll also point you to the access times, which showed 3.0ms in the first test and a staggering -0.5ms in the second. Clearly there's something else going on there, like caching to system memory. I've included the pictures just for fun.
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