Question : Problem: Testing RAID Disk I/O

Hi,

I would like to test the difference between different RAID Setups. I have been instructed to do this as we are having issues with hardware (mainly cheaper hardware of course). Part of this is to re-evaluate the difference between our standard RAID 5 Setup on SATA Hard drives and the ideal of a RAID 1+0 implementation on the same hard drives. Basically we are running premium sbs 2003 installs and of course utilising all of the sql functions, isa and general file sharing.

Can anyone provide some products/freeware software applications that would perform a wide range of quality tests on the disk I/O? I would like to also test how the different RAID setups perform under continuous stress after 10-12 hour periods.

Any help/advice would greatly be appreciated.

P.S

I know this has been done in the past by several people, but I cannot use the data I retrieve from the internet as that negates the point of assigning me to the job apparently :)

Answer : Problem: Testing RAID Disk I/O

IOmeter is probably the most common, bear in mind that some of your cheap controllers will enable the write cache even when there's no battery to back it up in the event of power failure. To make sure iometer performs enough long seeks partition the disk into several slices and run one thread on each partition.