Promise SmartStor DS4600 4-Bay Direct Attached Storage

Test System

Motherboard: ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer (Supplied by ASUS)
Processors: Intel 975 EE (Supplied by AVADirect)
Memory: Corsair Dominator 1600 MHz Triple Channel Kit
Graphics Card: Leadtek Quadro FX1700 (Supplied by Leadtek)
Enclosure: Lian Li V2000
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE2 (Supplied by Noctua)
SAS Controller: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i (Supplied by LSI)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate X64

We are going to test the Promise DS4600 with our latest Storage Product Testing Workstation. You can view more about the new system and the procedures used in this article.

The drives used for testing the DS4600 were provided by Seagate and they are Seagate 7200.11 1TB models.

Since this is the first time we have tested a DAS there is little data available for us to compare the performance to. We will be testing the system in RAID 5 with four drives and attaching the DS4600 to the rear eSATA port found on the ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufactures to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

We started out testing off with ATTO to get a baseline of performance for the DS4600. As we expected the read speeds were very good and the DS4600 pretty much maxed out our SATA port. Unfortunately we also expected the write numbers to be low since the DS4600 has to handle all of the XOR calculations. Still, the system is far from slow but it does take longer to write data than it does to read it.