Comments on: Linux Quick Tip – Benchmark Disk Performance

By: Alain Kelder

Alain Kelder — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:06:24 +0000

Hey Cesar, are those SAS drives 10K RPM or 15K RPM?

I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed with the performance of PERC controllers in Dell boxes I’ve used. I’m equally underwhelmed with the LSI controllers in the IBM boxes I’ve been using lately. I’ve found Areca controllers almost twice as fast using the same hard drives. I have some gripes with Areca (and most other commercial RAID controllers) so on my to do list is to get a fast PCI-E or PCI-X controller and see what sort of performance I can get out of Linux software RAID 10 over 8 or more 7.5K RPM SATA drives.

Installing an IBM DAS with 12 7.5K SATA drives in the next couple of weeks. Will test out RAID5 and RAID10 and see how fast it is..

By: Cesar Delgado

Cesar Delgado — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:18:09 +0000

Dell PowerEdge with PowerVault
PERC 6/E Controller
14 SAS drives in RAID 10
Timing buffered disk reads: 636 MB in 3.00 seconds = 212.00 MB/sec
——————————
Work Desktop
SATA drives
/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 196 MB in 3.01 seconds = 65.10 MB/sec
/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 204 MB in 3.02 seconds = 67.54 MB/sec

By: Alain Kelder

Alain Kelder — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:48:43 +0000

Yeah, bonnie++ is great. I usually use hdparm to get a general idea of a drive’s performance, then move on to dd and bonnie++ for more useful performance metrics of individual disks or RAID arrays with a filesystem on top.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:07:30 +0000

I used the public domain I/O test program named “bonnie” a few days ago.
Its easy to install/compile and execute and has reasonable results.
Below is an example:
[root@demo tmp]# ./run_bonnie.sh
Start bonnie at Thu Dec 18 14:06:41 PST 2008
File ‘/tmp/bonnie_tmp/Bonnie.16293′, size: 1073741824
Writing with putc()…done
Rewriting…done
Writing intelligently…done
Reading with getc()…done
Reading intelligently…done
Seeker 1…Seeker 2…Seeker 3…start ‘em…done…done…done…
——-Sequential Output——– —Sequential Input– –Random–
-Per Char- –Block— -Rewrite– -Per Char- –Block— –Seeks—
Machine GB M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU M/sec %CPU /sec %CPU
demo.fas 1 39.8 76.5 93.0 31.9 844.8 99.8 65.8 99.9 2557.8 99.6 77 0.5
End bonnie at Thu Dec 18 14:09:27 PST 2008
[root@demo tmp]#

By: Alain Kelder

Alain Kelder — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:21:21 +0000

The problem with hdparm is that it tells an incomplete story. I find tests that measure disk + filesystem performance more interesting. Here are some stats nevertheless:

—————————————————-
Dell PowerEdge 840 (tower)
Areca ARC-1110 controller (JBOD mode)
2 Western Digital 500 GB SATA, Linux Software RAID 1
—————————————————-
Timing buffered disk reads: 214 MB in 3.00 seconds = 71.33 MB/sec

—————————————————-
Dell PowerEdge 840 (tower)
Areca ARC-1110 controller (JBOD mode)
4 Western Digital 500 GB SATA, Linux Software RAID 10
—————————————————-
Timing buffered disk reads: 404 MB in 3.01 seconds = 134.13 MB/sec

—————————————————-
Dell PowerEdge 840 (tower)
Areca ARC-1110 controller
4 Western Digital 500 GB SATA, RAID 5
—————————————————-
Timing buffered disk reads: 666 MB in 3.01 seconds = 221.36 MB/sec

—————————————————-
Dell PowerEdge 2950
Perc 5/i controller
4 Western Digital 500 GB SATA, RAID 5
—————————————————-
Timing buffered disk reads: 346 MB in 3.00 seconds = 115.21 MB/sec