ATTO transfer rates - Read 1MB
ATTO's transfer rate tests will keep us on the reading and writing theme; I guess we'll save the arithmetic for later. We'll be using ATTO's transfer rate tests in a few different configurations to stress read and write transfer rates with different transfer sizes. First, let's check out the read performance for a 1MB block of data. 1MB should easily fit into the 2MB cache of our Maxtor hard drives, so RAID shouldn't make a big difference.

ATTO can sometimes produce funky results when the test block can fit entirely in a hard drive's cache, and it looks like we have some odd scores here. Adaptec's 2400A predictably has problems with RAID 1, but this time it's joined by Promise's FastTrak SX4000. The FastTrak SX4000 runs with the rest of the pack throughout the rest of the tests, but the 2400A runs behind in all but the four-drive RAID 0 and 10/0+1 configurations.

It's worth noting that, though the Escalade 7500 performs well across each RAID level, its performance tends to peak with a 256K transfer size and fall off steadily after that. The result is curious, since we're only dealing with a 1MB file.