Read/Write HDD Speed Test
These are the observations I recorded while doing some read/write speed tests on a server. The main goal was to see the performance difference between RAID1, RAID5, and RAID10. I also tossed in another RAID5 test with more drives.
The tests were performed with a PERC5 controller using 3 to 5 15K RPM SAS drives. Each time, building the array and initializing the drives on the controller prior to creating a partition and formatting it ext4 in Linux. Anyway, here are the results.
Device and Cache read tests were performed using ‘hdparm -tT’. Write tests were performed using ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=8k count=250000 && sync’.
| RAID1 | |||||
| Device Read | 72.16MB/sec | Cache Read | 897.15MB/sec | Write | 62MB/s |
| RAID5 (3 Drives) | |||||
| Device Read | 181.78MB/sec | Cache Read | 885.95MB/sec | Write | 110MB/s |
| RAID5 (5 Drives) | |||||
| Device Read | 188.76MB/sec | Cache Read | 901.91MB/sec | Write | 111MB/s |
| RAID10 (4 Drives) | |||||
| Device Read | 162.48MB/sec | Cache Read | 887.93MB/sec | Write | 136MB/s |
So the RAID10 had the fasted write performance at 136MB/s and the RAID5 with 5 drives had the fasted device read performance at 188.76MB/sec and cache read performance at 901.91.
Other random stuff.
| Single 7200RPM 1TB drive iSCSI drive on VMWare |
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| Device Read | 42.74MB/sec | Cache Read | 5,531.82MB/sec | Write | 11.1MB/s |
| Hardware RAID0 on local storage of VMWare |
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| Device Read | 228.06MB/sec | Cache Read | 5,668.57MB/sec | Write | 30.1MB/s |
| Single drive on local storage of VMWare | |||||
| Device Read | 105.89MB/sec | Cache Read | 5,905.20MB/sec | Write | 24.3MB/s |