Lab Tests: PCI Ultra-Wide SCSI Controllers By Mike Breeden Published: February 1998
Part 1 of a continuing series on SCSI controllers, disk drivers and Raid software.
Intro | Cards Tested  | ATTO Benchmark | FWB Benchtest  | Time Drive | MacBench | Summary
Results with TimeDrive v1.3 benchmark - with Conley and FWB drivers
During my discussions with various Raid VARs, TimeDrive was often mentioned as a benchmark. I show the results here but want to make it clear that I think they are suspect. It seems to be extremely cache sensitive. Only near the end of the testing did I discover that TimeDrive returned much higher "Typical" scores if it was run immediately after a reboot. I had been running all the cards and drivers using the same procedure - with Timedrive running after the FWB Benchtest. When run after another benchmark the timedrive average scores were lower by as much as 25% or more. I can only guess that this is due to the disk (ram) cache state being "dirtier" after another test had been run. No other benchmark I've seen exhibits this extreme a variation, but for most of my other tests I reboot between each run to ensure a clean cache state. In general though I saw so many identical numbers and odd scores that I want to rerun this particular test. Next time I will run this test immediately after a reboot. Since I was running late for this review, I tried to save some time (between all the card and driver swaps) but running Timedrive after the FWB test. I'll post the results of the retest as soon as it's done. In the meantime, take these scores with a grain of salt. I intend to rerun these tests again, with a reboot prior to test. Note: Unless otherwise noted, all rates are in KiloBytes/Second. Drivers: Conley denotes SoftRaid 2.0, FWB denotes Hard Disk ToolKit 2.06 (optimized). Time Drive v1.3 Results Red = Best Score, Blue = Worst Score. Card Driver Read Write Typical Adaptec 2940v3 Conley 7864 10485 916 Adaptec 2940v3 FWB 10485 10485 840 ATTO Conley 7864 10485 917 ATTO FWB 7864 10485 769 Initio Miles Conley 6291 7419 1031 Initio Miles FWB 7864 10485 666 Jackhammer Conley 7864 10485 952 Jackhammer FWB 7864 15728 747 Stock SCSI IBM AV 7200rpm Dr. FWB 6291 6291 698 The stock drive does well again, possibly due to the 4 MB disk cache. I'll be running the tests again with a 96k disk cache to see what effect a minimum cache setting has on scores. Initial tests were run with a large cache since that is often typical of systems with large amounts (384 MB) of ram. Large disk cache settings often hurt Photoshop performance according to many experts, but can really boost scores in most benchmarks like MacBench.
I've saved the most popular disk test for last, since MacBench 4.0 would not recognize the PCI SCSI when the FWB driver was used. It did recognize the Conley driver, and the scores are shown on the next page.
Index of SCSI Controller Comparison Report Intro | Cards Tested  | ATTO Benchmark | FWB Benchtest  | Time Drive | MacBench = Results Summary = - or - Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM
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