The controller is the AAA-UDMA, a four-channel UDMA/66 RAID controller supporting up to four hard drives in RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0/1, and RAID 5 configurations.
Regardless, it seems that this controller's RAID 0 functionality is mostly just good for write speeds, as in many cases its read speeds are lower than that of a single drive. Certainly the performance is nowhere near what I expected from a hardware RAID 0 array. For comparison, I created a four-drive software RAID 0 array as a comparison. Instead of creating the array with the controller, I simply booted Windows 2000 Professional with all the drives unused by the RAID controller. Windows detected them and I simply created a software array through the Disk Management applet. Here's how it performed:
While the processor usage is understandably
higher, this configuration provides much better results overall. Still, this
controller is supposed to be a hardware RAID device, and it's simply
unacceptable that it's faster with software RAID. The whole point of hardware
RAID is to take the burden of array processing off the CPU and make it faster
than the CPU could do it anyway, but the AAA-UDMA utterly fails to do the
latter. And the software array's CPU utilization isn't all that much higher
anyway, so the controller itself doesn't seem to be contributing much at all. If
you want a hardware-based RAID 0 controller with low CPU utilization, look
elsewhere.
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