LSI 9260-8i FastPath SAS RAID Card & OCZ Onyx 8 SSD RAID Performance Testing Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,386 words · ~6 min read
0:00
so I promised to do a video update when I had a chance to run the eight ocz Onyx
0:05
Series ssds in raid zero so you can see I've got these hooked up to an LSI Mega
0:11
raade fast path SSD optimized RAID controller and uh
0:17
what fast path does is it actually allows ssds to perform a little bit
0:21
better so fast path is just the little uh the little key that I have on there
0:25
it also enables some Advanced encryption features as well as the ability to use
0:30
ssds as a cache for a hard drive uh rate
0:35
array so that's a this is a pretty cool card this is the
0:39
9260 and it's uh it's actually a SAS I
0:42
did an unboxing of it it's a SAS 6 gbit per second card but as you can see it's
0:46
obviously compatible with uh SATA 2 ssds
0:51
I shouldn't even call it SATA 2 what I mean to say is SATA 3 GB per second so
0:57
here I'll show you actually here why don't we take this video as an
1:00
opportunity to show you how easy it is to set up a RAID controller card uh in a
1:05
raid zero configuration so first of all I want to show you some benchmarks here
1:09
you can see that with this array we were able to achieve uh almost 700 megabytes
1:14
per second read which honestly shouldn't
1:17
be that impressive this card is capable of well over 1 GB per second read with
1:21
the right ssds so that I was actually a
1:25
little bit disappointed in but the right speeds are very impressive the right
1:29
scale scaled almost linearly on these ssds so we were able to achieve up to
1:34
450 mb per on rights so I'll show you
1:37
what I mean by all of this in just a moment here
1:41
um this is kind of interesting I wasn't
1:44
having any challenges with the uh with
1:47
the raid configuration before or you know what I think it
1:51
is well looks like you get to
1:54
uh see some real time troubleshooting
1:58
here I think we've just got the wrong IP address cuz I was using this at home so
2:02
uh I have the the system IP wrong 192168
2:06
3185 so let's just do
2:10
that and there we go so let me just log in
2:18
here all right and now we're going to go into the
2:22
uh the mega raade configuration so the reason I'm a little bit disappointed
2:26
with the with the overall read speeds is you can see with well you would were
2:30
able to see you can see with a twood drive array so this is using all the
2:34
same raid configuration uh we were able to achieve 307 megabytes per second
2:40
already now with ssds typically with a good quality RAID controller like we
2:44
have and uh and a good quality SSD you should see almost completely linear
2:49
scaling so while these drives are rated for uh 125 mb per second reads uh
2:55
maximum you can see with two drives we were actually seeing that these drives
2:59
perform a little bit better than spec and they're scaling extremely well
3:03
because only two drives yield such strong read results now the this down
3:08
here is the random uh performance so you can see even with uh eight
3:13
drives uh random performance doesn't change very much so we've only got about
3:18
6,000 iops in 4k performance which is actually still very good compared to any
3:22
hard drive I mean you got to sort of keep that in perspective but uh
3:27
performance didn't really scale much from two drives all the way up to eight
3:31
drives so you can see two drives we were seeing about 20 megabytes per second and
3:35
then up to eight drives we see about 25 now with a deeper Q depth and a bigger
3:40
array you do see more uh you do see better performance and what that means
3:44
is that if you're multitasking a lot on a huge array like this you're going to
3:49
see better performance and it will continue to scale versus if you're not
3:54
multitasking and you're just uh reading and writing small 4K files now another
3:59
thing that did scale really really well with adding more drives was the rights
4:04
so you can see right iops are almost 3x
4:08
when we add uh four times as many drives so that's still reasonably good scaling
4:12
so I just want to show you the numbers as we go through here so remember this
4:16
is uh eight drives this is the run I just did like two seconds ago and then
4:20
this one here is with two drives so this is with four drives so you can see from
4:26
2 to four did not scale nearly as well so back to to two up to four did not
4:31
scale nearly as well in reads as from 1
4:35
to two because from 1 to two we got almost linear
4:40
scaling but you can see that especially rights scaled incredibly well so our
4:46
sequential rights doubled actually a little bit more than doubled and then
4:50
our 4K rights more than doubled so very
4:54
very efficient there and so then from four drives I went to six drives so once
4:59
again you see quite limited
5:02
scaling in some areas but again excellent scaling on the sequential
5:07
right so that's where we're seeing just just huge improvements and then finally
5:11
this is an eight Drive run that I did before I I was using slightly better
5:15
tweaked raid settings so that's probably actually the one I should be showing you
5:19
more than more than any other one but uh but yeah that's how I was able to
5:23
squeeze just a little bit more sequential readout of the whole thing
5:26
and uh actually substantially better uh 4K random rights so anyway that was
5:32
pretty much my video um I think that
5:35
what we've discovered here is that using 8 ssds of uh very very low performance I
5:41
mean the Onyx is a value SSD there's uh there's no two ways about it uh I think
5:46
what we'd be better off with is using something like four to six higher
5:50
performance ssds uh something like a Vertex 2 I mean vertex 2 right out of
5:55
the box is going to outperform probably anywhere from 2 to to three of these
6:00
Onyx ssds so what I discovered uh
6:03
running this experiment is that you're probably better off with fewer ssds but
6:07
higher performance ones so I'll just show you really quickly when you have a
6:11
when you have a premium raid card like this how easy and how quick it is to set
6:15
up a uh a raid array um all you really do is go into
6:20
actually you know what no I can't show you this because I wanted to actually boot up to the uh to the SSD raid array
6:26
so uh nope I can't wipe out my array but it's really fast you have to just
6:30
believe me you click this button up here you select the drives you press raid
6:33
zero and then there are actually some options that you can configure so if I
6:37
go into my virtual drive here I believe I can go to Virtual Drive and I can s
6:42
all the Virtual Drive properties so these are some of the things that that
6:45
you can Tinker around with if you do set up an SSD raate array so I've set things
6:50
up uh according to how LSI has recommended for the best fast Path
6:54
Performance although some people do report better performance with no read
6:58
ahead um and some people do get better
7:01
performance with right back cach enabled as well as cash Dio it really varies
7:07
depending on your SSD so you have to tweak and find out what works well with
7:10
your controller and your SSD so thanks for checking out our little uh raid Zero
7:15
Performance video don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips