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Atto/iStoragePro Performance and Testing Overview
Performance is a function of the RAID card used and the drives used, since the iStoragePro and similar enclosures do not by themselves provide RAID; the intelligence for RAID resides in the RAID card used.
Because I had only the ATTO R380 to test with, I do not know whether higher performance can be achieved with the Atto R680 or another brand card.
In general, the Atto R380 RAID card does not scale beyond 6 drives or so, throttling performance to lower levels. See the test results on the following pages.
Testing approach
I used the Atto R380 with dual SAS cables to the iStoragePro, which provides slightly higher performance than using a single cable (news to me, but I verified this in testing).
For sequential performance testing, I used DiskTester, with the run-sequential command.
DiskTester is about rigorous testing for serious use, not pretty charts. Example output:
disktester run-sequential --test-size 16GB --iterations 20 --xfer 4M
Example DiskTester output
------------------ Averages for "s8" (16GB/4MB, 20 iterations) ----------------- Iteration Write MB/sec Read MB/sec 1 751 634 2 752 635 3 752 637 4 750 637 5 749 639 6 750 639 7 753 660 8 750 637 9 754 637 10 752 636 11 757 688 12 754 637 13 751 637 14 754 638 15 750 642 16 748 639 17 752 639 18 746 636 19 749 635 20 750 638 Slowest 746 634 Fastest 757 688 Average 751 641 Median 751 637 Range 11.0 53.3 Command "run-sequential" executed in 1075.85 seconds on Saturday, November 6, 2010 4:34:17 PM PT
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