hard drive benchmarks.....v1.1

More not super scientific benchmarking....All test were on an HP ML350 G5, dual quad core, SmartArray P400 w/ 512mb ram, dual nics in multipathing mode, running VMware ESXi 5.1.

Two 146gb drives in RAID 1

Six 600gb drives in RAID 5

These next three are all going to a Western Digital Sentinel RX4100; the two nics are bonded using LACP.

Raw Disk Mapping

Normal Windows File Share

VMDK

There are subtle differences in the three WD Sentinel tests; do be fair I only ran the test once, so the differences COULD be statistical noise.

This last one is running the benchmark directly one the Sentinel itself.  Notice how much performance is being lost over the network.  I would be curious to find out if this a result of how the network is configured, the NICs in the Sentinel, or just what can be expected with network traffic.  By looking at these results, one could conclude that the 5400rpm drives in this machine are NOT the bottleneck.