Areca ARC-1880ix-24 PCI-E x8 SATA/SAS RAID Controller w/ 24 Crucial RealSSD C300s

CrystalDiskMark

Version and / or Patch Used: 3.0 Technical Preview
Developer Homepage: http://crystalmark.info
Product Homepage: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html
Download here: http://crystaldew.info/category/software/crystaldiskmark

CrystalDiskMark is a disk benchmark software.

Key Features:-

* Sequential reads/writes
* Random 4KB/512KB reads/writes
* Text copy
* Change dialog design
* internationalization (i18n)

Note: Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 is not available to the public yet, but the Technical Preview does allow us to test 4K performance at queue depths of 4 and 32 in addition to 1. The current release Crystal Disk Mark only shows us QD 1.

In CDM we look at the 4K performance of a drive or array and all I really have to say here is 'Cache is King!' - The cache module allows the Areca ARC-1880ix-24 to triple the 4K results from the HighPoint controller in most cases.

The 4K write tests were a little different, though. To be fair, the Areca ARC-1880ix-24 has so many settings that can be used to configure and tune performance it would take months to find the best settings for each scenario. NCQ performance can also be tuned, but we just tested the ARC-1880 with the base settings.