It would seem that it's time for us to sum up the results of our testing.
If it weren't for the poor performance in random IO tests, this would be a huge slam dunk win to the FiT 500E. 200MB per second for sequential or large transfers, no write penalties for RAID 3 and RAID 5? That's a storage nut's dream.
But the woeful random IO performance limits the use of the FiT500E to scenarios where large amounts of large files need to be stored. Storing lots of small files will leave you at the bottom of the performance curve, as the RAID processor spends more time decoding where the data is than retrieving or storing it.
To improve our mark, the FiT500E needs new firmware that handles random IO better for all RAID levels. It should take advantage of NCQ to the disk drives, and potentially "scatter-gather" where requests are re-ordered so that they can be serviced in a smarter way.
Scatter-gather is similar to the way an elevator works. If you need to stop at floors 15, 1, and 22, and the lift is on the ground floor, you don't travel to the floors in this order - you re-order them to save time. This also saves wear and tear on the elevator. A smart RAID controller can optimise random IO requests using a similar approach.
Highly recommended for:
- Backing up your computer
- Movie and TV files (home movies or recording on your Home Theatre PC)
- Music files and CDs
Overall we give the FiT500E a mark of 8 out of 10.
