Figure 30 – Hardware and Software RAID0 unbuffered overhead. Windows 2000’s software RAID0 and 3ware’s hardware RAID0 show almost identical results.
When file system buffering is used, Windows coalesces smaller requests into 64KB chunks and issues one deep requests to the disk. Since software RAID0 peaks at 20MBps for one-deep, 64KB requests while hardware RAID0 peaks at 30MBps, the peak buffered throughputs matched correspondingly. Riedel found that host-based RAID controller cards provided performance generally poorer than software RAID. However, given the 3ware card’s hardware RAID0 has slightly less overhead, almost identical unbuffered performance, and much better buffered throughput, it is advantageous to use the hardware RAID0 provided on the controller.
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