Maxtor DiamondMax 10: Exploring NCQ & RAID

Here we compare the two fastest configurations of drives from our earlier tests: the RAID 0 configurations using three Maxtor drives and two Raptor drives. Three different stripe sizes are configured on the two drive setups to show the impact stripe size has on performance.

Impact of Strip Size on Performance Performance with HD Tach

As you can see, in regard to read performance, smaller stripe sizes seem to offer better performance with 17-18 MB/s increased average throughput for the 4k stripe versus the 128k stripe.

The read performance pattern in repeated here. The pattern of write performance is similar, where the smaller stripe sizes offer similar in performance that falls off with the larger stripe sizes.

With burst performance, the stripe size seems to have little impact on the Raptor drives where there is less than 2% difference for all stripe sizes. In the three drive Maxtor arrays, the highest number in any of the testing for this article are seen with the smallest stripe size, with 343.3 MB/s on the 4K stripe size array.