[RndTbl] Raid benchmarks. Hardware vs. Software

John Lange john.lange at open-it.ca
Tue May 10 11:51:06 CDT 2005


I recently built a server with a hardware 3Ware 9500 RAID card. This is
the SATA version and it has 4 180G drives attached to it.

Once the machine was built I wanted to bench the RAID array just to make
sure everything was working and I thought I'd share the results here
just for interest.

For comparison I have results from a 4 drive SATA SOFTWARE RAID set and
my workstation.

Using bonnie++ v1.3a for benching.

Hardware RAID
-------------
Machine is a P4 3.2Ghz.with 2G of ram. (4 Disk SATA Hardware RAID 5)

Sequential Blocks Out:  53,282 K/sec
Sequential Blocks  In: 146,837 K/sec


Software RAID
-------------
Machine is a P4 2.8Ghz.with 1G of ram. (4 Disk SATA Software RAID 5)

Sequential Blocks Out: 64,924 K/sec
Sequential Blocks  In: 80,435 K/sec


Workstation (NON RAID ATA Drive)
--------------------------------
Machine is a Athalon 1.8Ghz.with 512K of ram.

Sequential Blocks Out: 22,081 K/sec
Sequential Blocks  In: 27,434 K/sec

Noteworthy: During block reads and writes, neither the software or
hardware raid caused any significant CPU load (less than 10% in all
cases).
 
-- 
John Lange
President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872
VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location



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