In testing both software and hardware raid performance i employed six 750gb samsung sata drives in three raid configurations 5, 6, and 10. Benchmarking linux raid unicom systems development. Software raid hands this off to the servers own cpu. Ive personally seen a software raid 1 beat an lsi hardware raid 1 that was using the same drives. As the linux software raid howto says, the combination of chunk size and block size matters for your performance. These linux raid reference benchmark results were carried out using the open source phoronix test suite benchmarking software. For more detailed io performance benchmarking, the flexible io tester fio can be used. Youll want to run the commands a couple of times to establish an average value. Intel has enhanced md raid to support rst metadata and orom and it is validated and supported by intel for server. You can benchmark both the direct reads and the cached reads.
A lot of software raids performance depends on the. Mdadm is a commandline utility that allows for quick and easy manipulation of raid devices. Raid 0 was introduced by keeping only performance in mind. You can read from a raid 1 just as if it were a raid 0. Benchmark samples were done with the bonnie program, and at all times.
The intel c236 chipset is supported only on poweredge r330, r230, t330, and t systems. There is some general information about benchmarking software. For a raid 1 array this doesnt matter since there is no chunk size to deal with. In this post we will be going through the steps to configure software raid level 0 on linux. Creating software raid0 stripe on two devices using.
The hw raid was a quite expensive usd 800 adaptec sas31205 pci express 12sataport pcie x8 hardware raid card. For linux distributions, postgresql was installed on ext4 file system in raid1 setup software raid using mdraid on two ssds, with atime disabled. Benchmark samples were done with the bonnie program, and at all times on files twice or more the size of the physical ram in the machine. Often, the server cpu is actually faster here but consumes system resources. While a file server setup to use software raid would likely sport a quad core cpu with 8 or 16gb of ram, the relative differences in performance. We will dive into configuration details and benchmarks of. Windows software raid has a bad reputation, performance wise, and even storage space seems not too different. Io controllerintel x99 and intel c236 chipsets note. For instance, here is the command i used to build a mirrored raid level 1 configuration.
Configure raid on loop devices and lvm over top of raid. If you want to use it, youll need to install it by hand. There is some general information about benchmarking software too. If you have a different vendor install their tool if not yet present. Understanding raid performance at various levels storagecraft. These linux raid reference benchmark results were carried out using the opensource phoronix test suite benchmarking software. Unfortunately, this software doesnt come with most distributions by default.
How to set up a software raid on linux addictivetips. The comparison of these two competing linux raid offerings were done with two ssds of raid0 and raid1 and then four ssds using raid0, raid1, and raid10 levels. You can benchmark the performance difference between running a raid using the linux kernel software raid and a hardware raid card. Pdf linux clusters of commodity computer systems and interconnects have become the fastest growing choice for building costeffective highperformance. And you can have multiple partitions of different raid types with linux md raid, for example a boot with raid1, and then root and other partitions in raid10far for. The benchmark using 10928 small source code files, maximum a few kib each. Linux io performance tests using dd thomaskrennwiki. And then linux md raid software is often faster and much more flexible and versatile than hw raid. Each raid level processes storage io in a different manner and stores data in a specific pattern across a set of raid member disks. It can, but in the case of linux which this benchmark was testing it doesnt. Linux software raid has native raid10 capability, and it exposes three possible layout for raid10style array.
This tutorial explains how to view, list, create, add, remove, delete, resize, format, mount and configure raid levels 0, 1 and 5 in linux step by step with practical examples. This software raid solution has been used primarily on mobile, desktop, and workstation platforms and, to a limited extent, on server platforms. A lot of software raids performance depends on the cpu that is in use. Latest software can be downloaded from megaraid downloads to configure the raid adapter and create logical arrays use either. Raid 1 isnt going to give you a performance benifit on write, but it can on read, think about it. Software linux raid 0, 1 and no raid benchmark osnews. How to create a software raid 5 in linux mint ubuntu. Linux software raid mdadm testing is a continuation of the earlier standalone benchmarks. Our goal is to highlight those storage patterns for raid levels 01105 and explain how each pattern affects the performance of the storage solution. The best way to create a raid array on linux is to use the mdadm tool. Postgresql benchmark on freebsd, centos, ubuntu debian and. This section contains a number of benchmarks from a realworld system using software raid. Hardware versus software raid on linux workstations hp. Monitoring and managing linux software raid prefetch.
The zfs dataset with postgresql data was created with the following parameters. Mdadm is linux based software that allows you to use the operating system to create and handle raid arrays with ssds or normal hdds. One thing i would like to do in the future when i have more disks is to rerun these benchmarks on a raid 5 array and vary the chunk size. Software raid how to optimize software raid on linux. Benchmarking linux filesystems on software raid 1 lone. The difference is not big between the expensive hw raid controller and linux sw raid. The mdadm command manages the linux software raid functions. Raid controller firmware, bios, driver version disk write cache policy setting. As some fresh linux raid benchmarks were tests of btrfs, ext4, f2fs, and xfs on a single samsung 960 evo and then using two of these ssds in raid0 and raid1.
Software vs hardware raid nixcraft linux tips, hacks. Learn basic concepts of software raid chunk, mirroring, striping and parity and essential raid device management commands in detail. Atto xtend san for osx enables iscsi connectivity for os x workstations. On the other hand, some raid cards introduce speed issues rather than solving them, we are way past the point where the cpu was important in raid setups, raid 1 has no calculation of parity anyway, so, unless you like to learn something and test various scenarios, dont even think of a raid controller for raid1 ssd. Raid 0 is used to enhance the readwrite performance of large data sets, and to increase logical unit capacity beyond the limits of a single disk device. In general, software raid offers very good performance and is relatively easy to maintain. Linux has an advanced softwareraid layer that not only supports different raid level eg. Raid5 is just the first example, and we hope our approach will inspire others to benchmark availability of other subsystems. These layouts have different performance characteristics, so it is important to choose the right layout for your workload. Software raid usually performs better than hardware raid in terms of raw disk performance. Software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage server. For example the linux md raid10far layout gives you almost raid0 reading speed. In the case of freebsd, the openzfs file system was used on two ssds in raid1 setup. For raid5 linux was 30 % faster 440 mbs vs 340 mbs for reads.