73 GB 10K SAS Drive RAID 10 Benchmark SuperMicro Server
Posted on Sep 25, 2009 by
Paul WhiteIf you are anything like me, that means you try to find used goods on
ebay rather than buying new hardware from Dell or HP. So I think I
scored pretty nicely with my $425 SuperMicro Server. It sports 4 x 73GB 10K
SAS drives, of which I have configured in
RAID 10 using the Zero
Raid add on card. So two drives striped while the other mirror. I was hoping for some fast transfers and I came to be strongly disappointed
Server Specs
SuperMicro SuperServer 6014H-324 x 3.5
SAS /
SATA drive bays
2 x Dual Core 3.6 Ghz Intel Xeon
4 GB DDR2 RAM
500 watt Power Supply
Intel E7250 Chipset ( Lindenhurst )
Setup Details
4 x 73GB Maxtor Atlas 10K V
SAS Drives
SuperMicro All-In-One-ZCR Card
AOC-SOZCR1 ( 64MB RAM )
Configuration
RAID 10 ( Striping + Mirroring )
The Stats
Min 46.4 MB/sec
Max 63.5 MB/sec
Avg 59.6 MB/sec
Access Time 7.8ms
Now I will admit that on my workstation I am running
RAID 0 with 2 x 146 GB 15K
SAS drives. So drives with twice the density and 50% faster spin rate. But still I wouldn't expect to get such poor performance from
RAID 10 from a few 10K
SAS drives. Also for the record I setup the Stripe Size to 64KB. The above test was testing a 64KB block size.
So I decided to change the block size and try again this time with a 128KB block size
As you can see increasing the block size to 128KB increased the performance a bit, Better but still nowhere close to the 180 MB/ sec I get from my workstation
I am starting to wonder if I have some features enabled ( shadow caching ) that could potentially affect the system's performance.
I am also now looking for some 146GB 15K
SAS drives to replace the 73GB 10K ones. I will need the extra storage but more importantly I need the faster speed for the server. I will be running a few
websites, ( some of which are
MySQL intensive ).
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