The mother of all disk benches! 4 disk SSD array, server SSD array, storage spaces

I built a new disk array for my Hyper-V lab at home. Overkill? Yeah, but I got tired of waiting for VM’s to boot, or build from deployment. When I study or learn something new I need efficiency! Plus there was a sale on 256GB drives and I found a little 4 disk hot swap box. For comparison I have a SSD array in a server, some single disks, and a 4 disk old SATA300 using Windows 8.1 storage spaces (software RAID).

My PC:?Intel Core i5 4670K | 32GB DDR1600
I’m using Crystal disk mark for testing.

*Note: I use RAID 0, there is a write penalty but these are SSDs. Yes, data isn’t important so redundancy, well, who cares. Although I do back it up with Backblaze?which allows me to backup meaningless VHDs.
4 disk RAID 0 SSD Array. Sandisk SDSSDHP256G 256GB SATA600 SSD
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1578.833 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1272.100 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 349.640 MB/s [ 85361.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 318.789 MB/s [ 77829.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 1419.964 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1146.151 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 125.328 MB/s [ 30597.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 100.152 MB/s [ 24451.2 IOPS]

Notice the increased read performance between the array and a single SSD disk, but how large the write penalty is with RAID 0.

Single SSD SATA600 OCZ-Agility 256GB
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 386.957 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 209.348 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 262.283 MB/s [ 64033.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 211.379 MB/s [ 51606.2 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 187.703 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 211.817 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 18.627 MB/s [ 4547.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 131.864 MB/s [ 32193.4 IOPS]

Single SATA Hybrid SATA600 ST750LX003-1AC154 750GB
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 104.197 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 105.733 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.317 MB/s [ 321.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.199 MB/s [ 292.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 104.002 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 106.107 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.663 MB/s [ 161.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.214 MB/s [ 296.4 IOPS]

Storage Spaces two-way mirror (RAID 10) 4 disk array SATA300 ST3750640AS 750GB
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 75.898 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 24.826 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.649 MB/s [ 158.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.284 MB/s [ 69.3 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 75.491 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 26.843 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.651 MB/s [ 158.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.284 MB/s [ 69.3 IOPS]

RAID 5 with 6 disk + hot spare. PERC H710P Mini SATA600
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2855.447 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2016.346 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 349.066 MB/s [ 85221.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 115.260 MB/s [ 28139.6 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 2185.178 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 1794.224 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 60.030 MB/s [ 14655.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 59.278 MB/s [ 14472.2 IOPS]

I’m going to have to work on the random reads and writes on this server. That should blow my home array out of the water.

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