4 - CF with Windows

Doin' RAID-0 on Windows

Right, we moved the RAID array into a windows based system and see how windows reacts. Since this controller is considered fake-raid, it'll likely perform much better in windows with the controller's Windows drivers heavily optimized and installed. The downside, more CPU overhead and you just can't boot Windows from the RAID array.

We moved the RAID controller into a Windows Vista setup. Now this is much more interesting as with the two CFs setup in RAID-0 we'll finally be able to see some reasonable performance.

First off, the controller needs to be installed with the driver (fake-raid). As soon as you boot into windows the plug & pray sequence will prompt you, after which the RAID-0 array SSD will become visible. In System Administration properties (see above screenshot) we find the drive, we see it's properly striped to 2x8GB. We simply give it a format, assign a drive letter and start using it.

We now use ATTO Disk benchmark and check out the RAID0 read performance. We spot write speeds of 9-10 MB/sec on normal file-sizes, we are nearing 29 MB/sec read performance though. Striping definitely works fine with the controller optimized. Let's try a real-world performance test by simple copying a 1GB file to the SDD and then from the SDD towards a HDD.

With the help of TotalCommander we move a 1GB file towards the SSD array. It's writing faster than ATTO reported. Roughly 15 MB per second.

When we write the file back to a local HD we see roughly 22 MB/sec, fairly impressive. Measuring SDD performance not exact science but with current CF memories this is what you can expect. We have some CF v4.0 flash memory inbound as well, and expect to update this article soon.