MD1000 Benchmarks

Question

I've just bought a poweredge 2950 and a powervault MD1000. I have the enclosure in unified mode with a single RAID5 on thirteen 7.2k 500GB SATA disks with a hot spare.   I've done some benchmarking with Iometer and I can't understand the results.   The test is:   64K transfer request 100% sequential 100% read   Running this for ten minutes I get an average I/O speed of 397MB/sec. While this sounds great, it doesn't make sense to me, I thought SAS bandwidth was 300MB/sec....plus these are 7.2k disks which I'm sure can't sustain that transfer rate.   Any insights would be appreciated!   thanks, Dan.

Dev Mgr · Answer

The connection between the MD1000 and the PERC is a 1200MB/s link (quad 300's) if I'm not mistaken. Individual drives can't do 300+ MB/s, but in a raid setup if the raid controller and bandwidth to the drives is fast enough, can definitly exceed the single drive speed.

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