[Chris Rye] "Areca was running a live demo showing 700+ MB/sec Read performance in both AJA and Blackmagic tests using only 8 drives in RAID 5 at NAB. CalDigit only claims up to 500MB/sec. So even if their both using the same Intel IOP, I quess the Areca engineering team delivers a better designed RAID controller around the Intel IOP to produce the higher performance. The 200MB/sec difference definetly compensates for the price difference."
Ah but the true question to ask of both Areca and CalDigit is for
HOW LONG will those speeds hold up? See with any hard drive array, they will start to lose speed at about 75% full and then they will get progressively slower as they fill up.
700MB/s sounds really fast, but is that speed maintained at 50% full? 75% Full? 80% full? how long? If it can't maintain the advertised speed up to 75% full, I consider that misleading advertising.
I know when it used to be HUGE Systems, those drives were always advertised with the slowest maintained speeds because they could absolutely guarantee the speeds. When the drives were empty, they were generally about 100MB/s or so faster than the advertised speed.
So that's the real question to ask of these guys and quite honestly ANY hard drive manufacturer who makes a claim of speed. "Are these quoted speeds for a newly cleaned and empty array or is this an array that's 75% full?"
I'm betting the CalDigit speeds are closer to reality than Areca for a "real world" drive that's in use.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
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