[wellylug] preliminary SATA Linux software RAID0/RAID1 comparison

Wood Brent pcreso at pcreso.com
Tue Oct 12 20:23:46 NZDT 2004



Basic hardware: A64 socket 939 3500+ (ordered the day before AMD announce a 17%
price drop this month- sigh!) Nforce 250 chipset

2x Seagate SATA 80Gb drives (7200RPM/8Mb cache)
1Gb memory


drives are /dev/hda & /dev/hde

partitions:

/         = 20Gb on hda
/home     = 20Gb on hde
4Gb swap on each
/raid0    = 20Gb on hda, 20Gb on hdb = 40Gb total (as /dev/md0)
/raid1    = 20Gb on hda, 20Gb on hdb = 20Gb total (as /dev/md1)

Mostly default settings from YaST on SuSE 9.1 to partition on install.

(& I know there is still plenty of unused disk...)

Some hdparm benchmarks, as an initial test...

(if anyone knows how to point bonnie++ at particular partitions/devices please
let me know....)


hdparm is basically returning simple data rates from cache & from disk, the
numbers are from about 4 runs:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda  1600 & 56Mb/sec
hdparm -tT /dev/hde  1600 & 55Mb/sec
hdparm -tT /dev/md0  1600 & 99Mb/sec
hdparm -tT /dev/md1  1600 & 45Mb/sec

I'm installing a Gb or so of data & software to use it, so will do some timed
trials for my GIS apps, but the initial look (admittedly hdparm is not an
extensive benchmark) is pretty suggestive.

I have run bonnie++ but can't see how to test specific partitions with it. As I
don't know which partitions it is using, I'm not including the results here.



Any suggestions/advice welcome. 


Brent




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