So last week we took delivery of our first United Digital 9116 PCIe RAID.
Unlike traditional RAIDs that connect via either a SCSI or Fibre card the United Digital 91xx series connect directly to the PCIe bus of the host Mac. This pretty much eliminates bottlenecks caused by traditional connectivity methods.
I like the design of this raid. it has a very simple easy to use web management console, easy to set-up email notifications for if things go wrong.
The system I was testing was a 9116 a 16 bay subsystem comprising of 8 x 750Gb SATA Hard Disks. This was connected to a 2.8GHz Quad Core Mac Pro running Mac OS 10.5.6 & 6Gb RAM.
Using Xbench the results were astounding: I was getting a sustained read speed of 669 MB/sec & sustained write speed of 470 MB/sec. I compared this against an Xserve RAID (7 x 250Gb HDD @ RAID 5) which could only muster read/ write speeds of around 140Mb/sec.
With performance figures like these, couple this with 10Gb Ethernet we could potentially have a serious lower cost rival to Xsan systems.
