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3ware Escalade 7850 RAID IDE controller

8 dischi IDE in RAID 10

Benchmark

Raid 10 vs Raid 5 Fileserver

Again I really enjoyed the 3ware controller. 3ware 7850 has no rivals among contemporary IDE RAID controllers at processing sequential read and write requests.
The 70MB/sec speed it showed in RAID5 array allows it to successfully compete with SCSI RAID controllers in tasks connected with processing large streams of information (such as high-quality video editing).
Excellent work with RAID10 makes the 3ware 7850 controller a good choice for "budget" file- and web-servers while high speed of random reads in RAID5 suggests it as an appropriate solution for data storage systems with random access.
Now, as usual, the list of all the advantages and shortcomings of the controller reviewed.

Highs:

Fast processing of sequential write requests in RAID5 array (>60MB/sec with four HDDs and >70MB/sec with five HDDs);
Excellent scalability of RAID0 under any workload;
Excellent RAID1 and RAID10 implementation.
Lows:

No PCI 64/66MHz support. As today's HDDs can reach 50MB/sec at linear read, four drives like that would use up PCI 64/33MHz bandwidth in full. If the controller has eight IDE channels and the specified StorSwitch bandwidth is 800MB/sec, the low bus interface bandwidth may become the bottleneck.

Non è un falso