I've finally collected enough enterprise grade SSDs to do some meaningful performance testing across different parity levels and platforms. Particularly with ZFS but also with hardware controllers. For virtualization storage, most people recommend RAID 10 (or striped mirrors) to achieve the best overall performance but other benchmarks seem to indicate that may not always be the case.
Here is what I intend to test. Let me know if there are other benchmarks that may be worthwhile.
I also intend to test different storage protocols. e.g. iSCSI, NFS and SMB at each parity level
Test 0 - Baseline of each drive type on its own
Test 1 - (4 ) and (5) SSDs
Software Raid ZFS - Striped, Mirrored Pairs, Raid Z1
Hardware Raid - Raid 0, Raid 10, Raid 5
Test 2 - (6) and (8) SSDs
Same as above plus RaidZ2
Test 3 - (12-13) SSDs
Same as above with mixed drive sizes
Here are the drives and HBAs I'll be using:
(4) Samsung 853t 960GB
(4) HGST 400GB SAS
(2) Dell (SanDisk) Enterprise 960 GB
(3) Toshiba Enterprise HK3R2 960GB
HBA -
(3) LSI-2008-8I IT Mode
(1) LSI-3008-8I IT Mode
(1) LSI 9260-8I Raid
I will not be using any expanders and the CP2600 dual E5-2670 should provide plenty of PCIe bandwidth and horsepower.
Here is some of the baseline single-drive testing
Samsung 853t (review)
Dell (SanDisk) 960
Toshiba 960 (review)
HGST SAS 400GB (review)
Here is what I intend to test. Let me know if there are other benchmarks that may be worthwhile.
I also intend to test different storage protocols. e.g. iSCSI, NFS and SMB at each parity level
Test 0 - Baseline of each drive type on its own
Test 1 - (4 ) and (5) SSDs
Software Raid ZFS - Striped, Mirrored Pairs, Raid Z1
Hardware Raid - Raid 0, Raid 10, Raid 5
Test 2 - (6) and (8) SSDs
Same as above plus RaidZ2
Test 3 - (12-13) SSDs
Same as above with mixed drive sizes
Here are the drives and HBAs I'll be using:
(4) Samsung 853t 960GB
(4) HGST 400GB SAS
(2) Dell (SanDisk) Enterprise 960 GB
(3) Toshiba Enterprise HK3R2 960GB
HBA -
(3) LSI-2008-8I IT Mode
(1) LSI-3008-8I IT Mode
(1) LSI 9260-8I Raid
I will not be using any expanders and the CP2600 dual E5-2670 should provide plenty of PCIe bandwidth and horsepower.
Here is some of the baseline single-drive testing
Samsung 853t (review)
Dell (SanDisk) 960
Toshiba 960 (review)
HGST SAS 400GB (review)
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