[astrophysicist]

I think you might be onto something about the peripherals slowing it down. I have been experimenting with other benchmarking software and settings. Some of the software, like ATTO and NBench, are giving me much higher results than XMark 7.0. My thoughts are perhaps the former software measure the actual physical capabilities of writing to the array itself, whereas the latter measures that performance of the entire system to write to the array taking into account all the overhead from other things running.

With ATTO and NBench, I am getting speeds ranging from 85MB/s to 104MB/s depending on settings. However, I noticed something strange with ATTO....if I had my USB Flash drive plugged into the computer and ran a test, the speed would get no higher than 60MB/s...take out the flash drive and speeds jump to ~100MB/s, which is odd.

In anycase, it is the actual system performance to write to these drives that I am interested in. I would think with a 3.42GHz proc with 3.25GB of RAM this shouldnt be a problem. Any ideas on how I can clean this up? I have tested the array with only essential peripherals and the speed increase is on the order of 10MB/s.

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saw you in the forum visitor list a few moments ago...haven't been around for a couple days and wondering where things stand now?

[gerryf]

saw you in the forum visitor list a few moments ago...haven't been around for a couple days and wondering where things stand now?

[astrophysicist]

Still stuck with the same situation as my last reply. I have tried several different things some of which give slight increases but not nearly enough to have the writing capability that we require. I don't really know what else to do; it might be time to face the fact that this RAID controller wont work as advertised with our system. If that is the case, I would really like to know why. Our system was designed for performance, it should be able to handle this amount of throughput. I will keep working on it and keep you informed.

Chris

[astrophysicist]

Just an update,

I talked to a few fellas who are in charge of all the "Return to Flight" video capture here at KSC. They actually seemed impressed with the numbers/speed we were running with on this controller. However, we still aren't satisfied and are searching other options. We have recently obtained a few Ultra 320 SCSI drives with small storage capacity - hopefully we can get some better performance from these, however 1 90 second video sequence will fill up a single drive!

Again, thanks for the help and advice.