TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   For this review we will keep things very simple since last time many of you asked us to include single SAS HDD tests since not everyone can obviously afford to have 8 SSDs in RAID0/1 configurations. Now normally when someone spends this kind of money to get an extra SAS/SATA card 8 SSDs shouldn't be something hard to get (especially with all the recent price drops) but the good thing with single drive tests is that if you can see a difference there then you will certainly see much more with several drives in RAID arrays. So this time we will be testing all 4 cards in single mode using one Seagate SAVVIO 10K.5 900GB SAS 2 6Gb/s hard disk drive (the fastest mechanical drive we have at hand). As expected we installed the latest firmware update on all 4 cards and used the latest drivers. Once again we used our standard selection of benchmark suites (tweaked as usual for SAS testing so we will not get unrealistic results) such as the HD Tach RW (Long Bench 32mb Zones), HD Tune Pro (read/write -when possible- speeds), Sisoftware Sandra Pro (Read/Write -also when possible- speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (1000MB read/write speeds), ATTO 2.46 (2GB Length, Max Read/Max Write speeds), IOmeter (256k Random Read/Writes) and PCMARK 7. Each test was repeated a total of 6 times and after that the average (not peak) performance numbers were recorded into our charts. As always every test was performed in a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with every update installed up to November 15th 2013.