Areca 1880ix-12 PCIe 6G SAS RAID Controller Review SSD IN RAID 0 – Preliminaries

We believe that our choice of performance benchmarks are pretty impressive and have to concede that we had a hard time getting benchmarks to run outside of cache numbers.

Some tests are simply impossible to run without disk caching.  That is really the beauty of the Areca though and one thing that many are very fast to point out!

“Thats cache speed!”

Admittedly, some evaluation results will be reached through cache speed but there is no other way to go about it while, at the same time, providing an accurate portrayal of what we can truly achieve here. For instance, AS SSD and ATTO Disk Benchmarks cannot be configured to a size large enough to exclude test data being run in cache.  With 4GB of cache, these two will have some very large numbers.

To even the scale however, we have also included IoMeter, Winows Experience Index and HDTach which are not ran in cache as they either have configurable test sizes or have the ability to test saples larger than the cache itself.

Perhaps on of the most impressive results you will see today is the brute force that the 1880 displays through its manhandling of PCMark Vantage HDD Suite.  The true performance of the card truly shines here as Vantage simply provides results from maximum transfer speeds reached in typical simulated user activities; the reviewer has no means of adjusting or ‘tweaking’ for optimum performance.

Last but not least, we utilize Everest to test latency of the card.  Lets take a look at the goods!

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK V.2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is the quickest and simplest method to determine transfer speeds and utilizes the same test methodology as manufacturers in arriving at performance results.  It simply measures raw sequential transfer speeds for both read and write access at various transfer sizes, producing a very easily understood result. The only limitation with this in RAID testing is that we cannot set a test length larger than the cache.

3.2 GB/s Read – 3.6GB/s Write

This is the best indication that we could have ever received that there was going to be many hours of pure enjoyment in this evaluation.  These numbers are simply some of the highest we have ever reached!

CRYSTAL DISKMARK X64 V.3.01

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The test file on the Crystal DiskMark test is configurable to the size of the cache, which allows a closer comparison of non-cached results. These are very impressive numbers and hard to match. The speed of the drives and the flexibility of the card under these loads definitely comes into play here.

Pg 1 – Introduction

Pg2 – Test Bench & Protocol

Pg3 – Preliminaries, ATTO & Crystal DiskMark

Pg4 – AS SSD & HD Tach

Pg5 – Windows Index & HDTune Pro

Pg6 – IOMeter & Everest

Pg7 – PCMark Vantage and Conclusions

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