Warning: These are not general purpose benchmark, but made specificly to tests many small files on a RAID1.

This page contains some data on a few tests of software RAID on FreeBSD 7 (2006-04). The tested were performed on a 1.8Ghz Opteron with 1GB RAM. The two Western Digital 36GB Raptor 10K RPM disks were attached to a Promise PDC40518 SATA150 controller.

FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT #5: Fri Apr 21 18:59:04 CEST 2006
    simon@eddie.nitro.dk:/FreeBSD/obj/FreeBSD/system-CURRENT/sys/NDGENERIC
CPU: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 844 (1800.01-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0xf51  Stepping = 1
  Features=0x78bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2>
  AMD Features=0xe0500800<SYSCALL,NX,MMX+,LM,3DNow+,3DNow>
real memory  = 1072955392 (1023 MB)
avail memory = 1040699392 (992 MB)
ACPI APIC Table: <A M I  OEMAPIC >
atapci1: <Promise PDC40518 SATA150 controller> port 0xc880-0xc8ff,0xc400-0xc4ff mem 0xff4fe000-0xff4fefff,0xff4a0000-0xff4bffff irq 19 at device 5.0 on pci1
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci1
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci1
ad4: 35304MB <WDC WD360GD-00FLC0 33.08F33> at ata2-master SATA150
ad8: 35304MB <WDC WD360GD-00FLC0 33.08F33> at ata4-master SATA150

The test performed was extraction and subsequent deletion of the FreeBSD ports tree from a tar file located on another disk.

Note: The system was not totally idle while the tests were performed which may make some tests a bit bogus, but to compensate for this I ran each test at least 5 times, and the trends seems clear even with the variation.

For the test /usr/bin/time was used for timing, which is not highly acurate, but since each "even" is a couple of minutes that should not be a big problem.

Test ran so far: gmirror with load, prefer, round-robbin, split balancing, and ataraid ("ar").

The "raw" test result can be found at http://simon.nitro.dk/freebsd/raidtest-2006-04/. In the test file each line is a test run and all numbers are runtime in seconds. The .val files are the output from the test program and the .tot files are the total values extracted from the .val files for use with ministat. In the .val files the E: part is the tar extration, R: is removal (rm -r) and T: is total runtime for the test (including newfs etc). The three numbers are real, user, and system time.