HD Tach V2.70	Source: TCD Labs Inc.

*Unfortunately, as it can only 'see' hardware RAID arrays and not Windows created software RAID arrays, we were unable to use HD Tach to benchmark our software stripe. The traditional drive speed-testing benchmark show us that Hardware RAID 0 offers the fastest data read times, while Hardware RAID 1 offers the best CPU utilization.

Timed Data Transfers	Source: n/a

While not the most scientific of methods, this certainly illustrates real world file copying performance. We hauled the 'I386' directory from a Windows Server CD onto our system drive, then proceeded to copy this 488 MB chunk of many, many files to and from each of our drive configurations several times, averaging the scores. Timing the transfers revealed some interesting things.

Time Data Transfers
	Physical Drive Size	Upstream Transfer	Downstream Transfer
No RAID, Single HDD	120GB	43s	39s
Hardware RAID 0	240GB	33s	34s
Software RAID 0	240GB	33s	35s
Hardware RAID 1	120GB	49s	51s
Units:		seconds	seconds

Again the performance advantage RAID 0 gives us is clear.

RAID Test conclusions:

Both hardware and software RAID 0 should offer a significant increase in overall hard disk performance to any system. The tradeoff between the two is in expense (if your system does not have a hardware RAID controller built in) vs. the slightly increased load on the CPU that software RAID imposes.

We took screen shots of the task manager CPU usage graph while we were running our file copying tests on both RAID 0 configurations:

Not a huge difference, but it's there. Overall though, either implementation will serve you well.

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