We carried out a set of tests on our Athlon XP 2800+ system equipped with the Highpoint controller and the twin 120GB Seagate ATA-5 drives. Using three different hard disk benchmarks, plus some timed file copies we tried to get a picture of just how much of a real-world performance boost a hardware or software RAID 0 array will give as compared to a single drive. We also tested a RAID 1 configuration to see where it fits in terms of speed.

PCMark 2004	Source: FutureMark

PCMark 2004 HDD Benchmarks - Results
	Physical Drive Size	XP Startup	Application Loading	File Copying	General HDD Usage
A) No RAID, Single HDD	120GB	7.168	6.536	22.778	5.085
B) Hardware RAID 0	240GB	10.281	7.050	32.104	6.588
Software RAID 0	240GB	10.535	6.984	29.426	6.713
Hardware RAID 1	120GB	8.396	5.391	15.353	5.364
Units:		MB/s	MB/s	MB/s	MB/s

The results of the tests speak like this, for the "XP Startup" tests RAID of any sort seems to be an advantage. When we consider "Application Loading," there isn't much of advantage for RAID 0, though you can see a performance handicap imposed by RAID 1 begin to appear. The "File Copying" tests definitely show the advantage of having a RAID 0 setup. Lastly, the "General HDD Usage" tests show surprisingly little difference between a software and hardware RAID 0 array, at least on a fast computer.

SiSoft Sandra 2004	Source: Sandra

Sandra is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system and individual components. The numbers taken though are again, purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance.