During our tests we used the configuration listed below and the only variable component between each benchmarking session was the hard disk drive being tested. We also build a RAID0 array with two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160 GB (ST3160815AS, SATA-300, 7,200 rpm, 8 MB buffer) hard disk drives with the ICH9R south bridge chip from the motherboard we were using (ASUS P5K-E/WiFi-AP, which is based on Intel P35 chipset), using the recommended strip size, 128 KB.
We adopted a 3% error margin. So, performance differences below 3% cannot be considered meaningful. In other words, products where the performance difference is below 3% must be considered as having similar performance.
