RED 640GB - Esata vs FW800

[Steve Freebairn]

Nothing super scientific, just a quick and dirty aja speed test. The esata is through a cheap little esata adapter that is a x1. The fw800 drive test was powered (as recommended) from an external adapter then plugged directly into a nehalem Mac Pro.

And RED isn't joking when they talk about demanding and specific requirements for RED Media, look at how flat those graphs are. That's incredible and consistent.


Update:
Pic 12 is esata
Pic 13 is to show test settings
Pic 14 is esata graph
Pic 15 is fw800
Pic 16 is fw800 graph

 

[Shawn R]

Can't see the pics well enough to read the numbers. My guess is that the 640's are 2 500gig drives that have been adjusted to make them appear smaller and therefore faster.

EDIT:

Thanks for the update. Yes that is very even. How much was on the drive or was it empty?

EDIT August 8, 2009:

Jeff, from the speeds I don't know where I got that idea from. If they had short-stroked the drives it would be faster than that.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Can't see the pics well enough to read the numbers. My guess is that the 640's are 2 500gig drives that have been adjusted to make them appear smaller and therefore faster.

Where did you come up with that reasoning?

There's 2x320GB HDDs in there. I haven't benchmarked one myself yet, but they should be a good bit faster than the 320GB RED Drives, assuming the internal RAID controller is not a bottleneck. Most 2.5" 320GB 5400rpm HDDs on the market are 45-55% faster in sustained transfers than their 160GB counterparts. So I would expect similar speed relationships to translate over to the new RED Drives. That said, an eSATA connection would be more desirable if available. FW800 has about a 95MB/s max rate, not taking overhead and other inefficiencies into account. FW800 wants to top out at about ~75MB/s on my '08 Mac Pros and G5 Quad systems... My '09 Mac Pro is giving me about 80MB/s. Whereas eSATA can handle over 300MB/s and I can sustain almost 90MB/s from a 320GB RED Drive there. I would be surprised if the new 640GB RED Drives can't deliver 120MB/s or more using a LEMO to eSATA cable.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Sign me up for 120MB/sec. offloads :hurray:

 

[Shawn R]

Jeff have you had any experience with the mini G-Raid?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff have you had any experience with the mini G-Raid?

Not really, I've only used a couple of them when copying footage for others. Can't really comment on them.

Looking at the I/O performance in Steve's tests, I'm really wondering if the onboard RAID controller isn't a bottleneck. Those are about the same numbers I get for a 320GB RED Drive, the FW800 numbers are the same, that's as good as it's going to get under this test. Under eSATA, It seems the write speed is about a bit faster than what I see with this test of the 320GB drives, but the read speed is right at 90MB/s, which is what I see with the 320GB drives as well.

Anyway, I'll benchmark a 640GB Drive soon... Just haven't got around to it yet as I don't personally own one.

 

[Steve Freebairn]

I'll test a 320 sometime soon. The card in this computer isn't fantastic, I'll wait until I get time with a high end RAID card for super scientific tests, but I remember looking for something like this awhile ago, and couldn't find it so I just threw some numbers up. Most of the time I end up backing up to slower drives than the RED drives anyway, so once Conrad changes R3D data manager to copy to all sources at the same time/speed, then unless I'm going to 2 or 3 24 Drive RAID 6 setups, then 90MB/sec will be just fine by me.