Who's got a Seagate 7200.10..?

rpstewart said:
They're around £150-175 +VAT so about half the price of an Areca 1220 but unlike the Areca card the Highpoint doesn't have a dedicated XOR processing engine. Rather the 2320 is an "accelerated software" card which provides better write performance than fully software solutions like the Nvidia mobo controllers but still uses the main CPU for XOR processing.

Bugger - missed the fact that that was a Highpoint not an Areca - cheeky how they use the same numbers - still waiting for the Areca's to start appearing on Fleabay at reasonable prices! - How much of a speed hit does the lack of XOR engine make (for a given processor)?
 
The speeds are OK actually, it's no screamer but it's fine for storage. I've just done some brief tests copying between the RAID5 on the Highpoint and a pair of 7200.10s in RAID0.

Copying onto the RAID0 gives about 100-120Mb/s which is about what you'd expect for a pair of decent drives so this is a sort of reasonable benchmark to compare the Highpoint with.

Copying to the RAID5 array was running at 60-80Mb/s so significantly slower considering that there are 8 disks in the array. CPU usage was about 40-50% on a 4400X2.

It's clear that the Highpoint isn't the quickest controller in the world but you could live with it. For storage it's more than adequate and with a decent amount of grunt behind it you could argue that it's almost quick enough to boot from.
 
Hmmmm... as much as I love these new seagates, those speeds just won't cut it against my Cheetahs - will have to wait until the Areca's come down in price and then give them a go - lucky as I've just picked up another 4 Cheetahs and an enclosure for 'em :D
 
I have two 250GHz in Raid0, this is my 1st raid setup and have nothing to compare it to, so looking for info on my HDtach results, I got 282.5Mbs on burst speed, 132Mbs on average read and 13.5ms random access.
 
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