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 MacBench 4.0 Disk and Publishing Disk Tests
MacBench 4.0 Disk and Publishing disk tests could only be run with the Conley SoftRaid 2.0 disk driver, as MacBench would not recognize the PCI SCSI when the FWB driver was used. This is a known bug in MacBench and the workaround is to have all drives connected to the PCI SCSI card. Raid arrays connected to a PCI SCSI card always seem to be recognized by MacBench, unlike most standard volumes. If the MacBench scores seem low, remember this test was run with a 180mhz 604e processor and a single drive (not an array). MacBench 4.0 Results Red = Best Score, Blue = Worst Score. Card Driver Disk Pub Disk Adaptec 2940 Conley 447 384 Adaptec 2940 FWB N/A N/A ATTO Conley 448 378 ATTO FWB N/A N/A Initio Miles Conley 456 382 Initio Miles FWB N/A N/A Jackhammer Conley 460 381 Jackhammer FWB N/A N/A Stock SCSI IBM AV 7200rpm Dr. FWB 347 165 Note: N/A = the drive was not recognized by MacBench with the FWB driver installed. TOP PERFORMERS: JackHammer Card and Conley SoftRaid 2. View Raid Scores for this Test
You can see that all the cards delivered nearly identical MacBench performance. The stock disk did well on the standard disk mix test, but was less than half as fast in the Publishing Disk test. I was surprised the score was so low. Possibly the driver is optimized for large file I/O (being an AV drive) and therefore suffers on smaller file I/O speeds. The ATTO 32K test results also back up this theory.
This completes the first series of tests. I've summarized the findings on the next page. Parts two and three of this series shows results with a two drive Raid array using five of the most popular Raid software packages. Part two shows results obtained with a dual SCSI card setup and part three with a single SCSI card. Visit the main site for daily news, tips and a great selection of upgrade reviews, tutorials and forums!
Index of SCSI Controller Comparison Report Intro | Cards Tested  | ATTO Benchmark | FWB Benchtest  | Time Drive | MacBench = Results Summary =  |  Go to Raid Test Pages - or - Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM
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