Like many of home lab owners out there, I have some servers and I like to make the most out of them. One of the upgrades I made to my Dell T320 was the RAID card. While H310 is not a bad controller, I ordered its bigger brother, the H710. And, of course, I ran some speed tests, before and after.

The following numbers were taken using 4 x 3 TB Seagate Constellation ES.2 7200 rpm in RAID 10, before the upgrade, using DiskMark with two file sizes: 1 GB and 500MB:

Decent, but nothing to write home about.

The new controller has 500 MB cache and a backup battery. The test were performed with 4 SAS drives of 600GB and 10k rpm in RAID 10, using the same values for the test file size. The numbers are outstanding:

And now, here are the results using a 16 MB test file (the smallest available with DiskMark:

I know, I know, the cache cheats the test, but, hey, those values sit between the speed of a SATA SSD and that of a NVMe. Not bad for some 7 years old spinning drives costing a fraction of their SSD equivalents !