decklink software doesnt test performance of catalyst.

it only tests bulk block read and writing- not the critical random access reading and writing.
headline data transfer rate is useless for benchmarking.


You can only test catalyst with random read tests, where file can be read randomly from any sector on the disc.

as tests on barefeats ( other web sites ) and other systems show time and time again -

http://www.barefeats.com/quad07.html

they show very fast headline data transfer rates - in this case 200MBytes/second.

but lamentable random access transfer.

and i quote directly -
The remaining performance issue is slow small random read speeds for one, two, three or four drives. No matter how many drives you configure in RAID 0 sets, the average random read speed for combined block sizes from 64K to 1024K is less than 30MB/s!
A raid is NOT faster than a single disc for random access- unless you have huge files.

What is important for catalyst is the disc seek time - not the data transfer rate.

So a single fast scsi disc ( and really a 15k drive is essential for lots of layers ) -will be faster than any standard raid made up from slow ATA or SATA disc - ( unless they use aggressive caching like an xserve raid )

you need to check out the random readwrite tests on storagereview.com for any kindof performance evaluation.