As a minor spoiler, there isn’t a huge advantage for either controller for single disk accesses, so the figures of accessing the six disks individually and running software RAID on top should generalize to other SATA controllers. The benchmark between using the motherboard and the Adaptec card SATA controllers to access a single disk gives an indication of how much difference there is in the SATA controller for single disk access. One advantage of using six single disk volumes through the Adaptec card is that it makes the comparison a direct one between using the hardware RAID chip and using the Linux kernel to perform RAID - the SATA controller that the drives are attached to is the same in both tests. I tested software RAID by creating a RAID over these six single volumes accessed through the Adaptec card. I then attached the six disks to the Adaptec card and exported them to the Linux kernel as single non-RAIDed volumes. I tested a single drive on the motherboard SATA controller and then as a single disk exported through the Adaptec card so that I could see the performance difference that the Adaptec card brings to single disk accesses. I didn’t use the entire available space in order to speed up RAID creation.īecause the motherboard in the test machine had only four SATA connectors, I had to compromise in order to test six SATA drives. I tested against about 100GB of space spread over the six disks using equal-sized partitions. 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 between hardware and software RAID on this machine should still give a good indication of the performance differences to be expected on other hardware. The test machine was an AMD X2 running at 2.2GHz equipped with 2GB of RAM. For software RAID I used the Linux kernel software RAID functionality of a system running 64-bit Fedora 9. I ran the benchmarks using various chunk sizes to see if that had an effect on either hardware or software configurations.įor the hardware test I used an $800 Adaptec SAS-31205 PCI Express 12-port hardware RAID card. I measured performance using both Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmarks. In testing both software and hardware RAID performance I employed six 750GB Samsung SATA drives in three RAID configurations - 5, 6, and 10.
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