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Escalade Climbs Performance Charts
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October 10, 2002
By Eric Fleming
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Ready for RAID storage with a twist? 3ware's new Escalade 8500 Serial ATA (SATA) controller card supports up to 12 drives and facilitates greater data-transfer rates than ever. Gone are the days of the bulky 40-pin cables precariously snaked through a computer chassis--the Escalade 8500's advanced interface uses a sleek, seven-pin connector that can run up to nearly double the maximum length of current IDE cables.
The Escalade 8500 boasts other unique attributes. 3ware's patented R5 Fusion technology uses a larger than average packet buffer to let the card cache information for quicker reads and writes to the drive array. The Escalade 8500 also uses 3ware's StorSwitch architecture in place of the standard shared data bus of conventional drive arrays--enabling faster information writing to memory without burdening the system processor. In fact, the Escalade 8500 has a built-in processor that handles all RAID management code as well as error-checking. The StorSwitch architecture segregates each drive, so if a drive failure should occur, the whole array won't go down.
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A new technology, SATA is poised to replace the venerable IDE interface as the de facto standard in desktop computing. Enabling increased burst-data-transfer rates of up to 150 MBps with first-generation cards, and planned speeds of up to 600 MBps with future generations, SATA outperforms even the fastest of today's IDE drives and competes with SCSI drives. Another plus: SATA drives are hot-swappable, a capability usually found only in SCSI and Fibre Channel systems.
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Good
High-speed massive storage--up to 2 TB.
Space-saving.
Drivers compatible with both Microsoft Windows and Linux.
Bad
Card gets hot! May be a concern in high-density situations.
PCI bus may be a bottleneck for data transfer.
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System admins can use the card's browser-based management utility to remotely check on the status of any array or drive connected to the controller. 3ware has included both user and administrator access levels to prevent accidental changes in array setup, and for e-mailing error alerts. The card ships with drivers for Microsoft Windows 98, NT, 2000 and XP; Red Hat Linux 6.2, 7.1 and 7.2; and SuSE Linux 6.4, 7.2 and 7.3.
On the Money
I tested the Escalade 8500 in Network Computing's Green Bay, Wis., Real-World Labs®. 3ware sent a dual-processor AMD 1900 computer with an Escalade 8500-8 controller card running Windows XP Professional. The card had eight 125-GB Maxtor SATA drives: The first two were configured as RAID 1 (mirroring), and the remaining six were set up in a RAID 5 configuration. This yielded an impressive 686 GB of usable storage space.
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Vendor Info
Escalade 8500 RAID controllers. 8500-4: $499; 8500-8: $599; 8500-12: $849. 3ware, (877) 883-9273, (650) 327-8600.
www.3ware.com
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I used Intel's Iometer software to test the data throughput of both drive configurations. During the course of the 64-KB sequential data read test, I noticed that the RAID 5 drive array returned an increase of nearly 20 percent in MBps throughput. As expected, the RAID 5 configuration outperformed the RAID 1 setup in each testing environment--in one test, the RAID 1 array results were half those of the RAID 5 array. I wasn't able to reproduce transfer rates at the advertised 150-MBps rate, though the product documentation did mention that this rate normally is attainable only during cached transfers to a drive array. Another potential throughput bottleneck is the bus--it's incapable of handling the Escalade's advertised transfer rate.
Overall, if the Escalade 8500's performance is any indication of how well SATA technology will replace the IDE interface, and considering SATA's price advantage over SCSI, I'm ready to buy into the technology now.
Eric Fleming is a network administrator for KI, a furniture manufacturer based in Green Bay, Wis. Write to him at efleming@nandgate.com.
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