Do It Yourself NAS

Legit Reviews takes a 6Gbps SATA/SAS LSI RAID card for and spin and ends up with a lot of performance graphs.

Today I have LSI’s latest RAID card, the MegaRAID 9260-8i SAS 6Gbps controller. Featuring a compact PowerPC RAID-on-Chip controller, 512mb of DDR2 cache, a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot, and SAS/SATA 6Gbps connectivity, the 9260-8i is one well equipped RAID card. Marketing documentation boasts of maximum 2875MB/s reads and 1850MB/s writes through the 800MHz PowerPC LSISAS2108 ROC, well over three times the throughput limits of the ICH10R controller built into Intel’s desktop platforms.

The Tech Report has benchmarks of the new USB 3.0 standard. They’re compared against USB 2.0 and eSATA.

StorageNerve has benchmarks for the 4-slot Drobo connected using USB 2.0 and Firewire 800.

George Ou over at ZDNet has RAID benchmarks for various flavors of RAID, based mainly around the RAID10 and the Intel ICH8R RAID controller.

SmallNetBuilder has a list of NAS devices benchmarked by different criteria. A homebuilt Ubuntu NAS device make an appearance in several benchmarks.

X-bit labs benchmarks eleven 160 GB hard drives.

SmallNetBuilder takes a look at the Norco DS-500, a five drive eSATA attached drive enclosure.

Tom’s Hardware benchmarks a couple of 7200 drives in RAID 0 and compares them against the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. For fun they put the Raptor in a RAID 0 array too.

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.

X-bit labs benchmarks several different models of 400 GB SATA drives in four drive raid arrays. Tests are done using an Areca ARC1220 RAID controller, probably on Windows.