Thermaltake Muse R-Duo: External RAID

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is the latest benchmark available from Futuremark, and requires on Windows Vista. Similar to the venerable PCMark05 in its makeup, Vantage modernizes the criteria and test methodology to reflect what users may encounter when running the most current Windows operating system. For the HD test suite, Futuremark breaks the tests down as:

• Windows Defender: Windows Defender performs a scan operation, resulting in a read-intensive (99.5% read, 0.5% write) benchmark reflecting a common task in Windows Vista.
• Gaming Performance: Measures streaming performance using actual game mechanics found in Alan Wake. This test is nearly all read (99.95% read, 0.05% write) in nature.
• Windows Photo Gallery: Windows Photo Gallery imports a large collection of images. This is the first of the tests which bring write performance into account in a meaningful way, with a roughly 84% read, 16% write ratio.
• Windows Vista Start-up: Simulates Windows Vista start-up operations, producing a test that breaks down to roughly 85% read and 15% write operations.
• Windows Movie Maker: This is the first Vantage test that comes close to equally dividing read and write operations (54% read, 46% write). It tests concurrent video performance for video read and skip performance, as well as video write operations.
• Windows Media Center: Performs the following three tasks, with a result split equally between reading and writing.
  • SDTV video playback
  • SDTV video streaming to Extender for Windows Media Center
  • SDTV video recording
• Windows Media Player: Windows Media Player adds a selection of music. This test reverts to favoring read operations (78% read, 22% write).
• Application Loading: Loads the following applications, giving a benchmark divided as roughly 87% read, 13% write in nature.
  • Microsoft Word 2007
  • Adobe Photoshop CS2
  • Internet Explorer 7
  • Outlook 2007

We run each test five times per drive, producing an average score that we use for comparison in our charts. Our Vista strategy follows the one we're using for Windows XP: Apply only major milestone releases (SP1, SP2, etc.) except when absolutely necessary, and keep drivers updated when required. When a major driver (or OS) version is released, we will go back and re-run previous benchmarks to ensure that the data remains consistent. For our tests, we disable Windows Defender, set the paging file to a static 3.0GB size, and limit the Recycle Bin to 1GB maximum. We also close all desktop widgets.

We find more of the same in our Vantage benchmarks. The Muse performs adequately as a single drive enclosure but poorly as a RAID controller. In PCMark Vantage, we don't see many of the really poor Big mode performance issues that we saw under XP, but the results scale more or less the same way.