DH Tune measurements

Before, PCI bus RocketRaid 1820a:



After, PCI-E RocjetRaid 2320:

Average IOmeter trasfer speed:

• before 72 MB/s
• after 154 MB/s (increased 100%)

One interesting media streamer

Recently I found unknown for me streamer -- EZ media. What was new for me:

• no HDMI, only DVI (converter DVI to HDMI included)
• plays WMA Pro and MPEG Pro (usually max quality is limited 320 kbs MP3 and WMA)
• plays H.264 AVC MPEG4 part 10 HD video (does it play Matroska containers???)
• UPnP 1,5 and DNLLA 1,5 compliant (most streamers are UPnP 1.0 compliant)

Product line includes SimpleCenter software media server and EZsource NAS (not yet available).

Disk subsystem throughput

As told earlier, I swiched from PCI RAID controller to RocketRaid 2320 PCI-E (x4) RAID controller. Throughput is up significally:

Read speed:

• Before 100 MB/s
• After 520 MB/s (UP 5,2 times)

Write speed (RAID-5)

• Before 54 MB/s
• After 150 MB/s (UP 2,8 times)

Important fact is, that using packets less than 8 MB gave > 1022 MB/s read/write speeds because of new cache employed on the new controller. I's PCI-E x4 physical limit !?

PCI-E RAID controller installed

Due to some compatibility issues I decided to get rid of old-fashined PCI RocketRaid 1820A and replace it with very modern PCI-Express technology RocketRaid 2320 unit. It has PCI-E x4 architecture.

My media server in the nutshell

• Dell PowerEdge SC1430
• Quad core Intel E5335 CPU 2,0 GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 2x4 MB L2 cache
• 2GB Memory
• HDD 80 GB dedicated to OS and programs
• RAID 5 2,25 TB (4x750 GB Hitachi SATA), dedicated to digital media
• RocetRaid 2320 RAID host adapter, PCI-E x4 (300 MB/s each SATA port)
• Broadcom Gigabit NIC

My main objective was to get away from compatibility issue, but once I had to reinstall my RAID, I choce more potent PCI-E model to get rid of all possible bottlenecks in the data path.

System bottleneck speeds:

So, network is the slowest link in the chain.