Raid 1 software performance tuning

Disk mirroring is a good choice for applications that require high performance and high availability, such as transactional applications, email and operating systems. A 240gb model has performance benefits over an 80gb model. The file size was 900mb, because the four partitions involved where 500 mb each, which doesnt give room for a 1g file in this setup raid1 on two mb arrays. Ive personally seen a software raid 1 beat an lsi hardware raid 1 that was using the same drives. Windows software raid has a bad reputation, performance wise, and even storage space seems not too different. Linux os tuning also improves performance for lsi sas hbas. From the tests that we performed it seems that there is performance drop while ntfs block size isnt configured properly according to chunks size and amount of disk drives in. Most all any optimization and new features reconstruction, multithreaded tools, hotplug, etc.

Raid 1 is pure redundancytwo drives combine to give you the. Hw and sw raid performance tuning on ntfs volumes opene. This will include the description of those settings that are necessary to avoid data loss when power failures occur which could otherwise risk the destruction of the file system. Array tuning best practices page 5 1 10 provides the best overall performance for redundant disk groups. Raid 1 10 performance can be 20% better than raid 5 in these environments, but has the highest diskcost. The cache block size is the minimum amount of data that can be read into the cache.

Accelerating system performance with ssd raid arrays. Jul 10, 2017 so after getting some community feedback on what disk configuration i should be using in my pool i decided to test which raid configuration was best in freen. The rest of you should leave numa enabled at defaults and walk away. Tkperf implements the snia pts with the use of fio. If the point to compare a single raid 10 disk to 2 raid 1 disks, you have to find a way to do just that. Microsoft notes that, although raid level 1 does provide fault tolerance and generally improves read performance, the write performance may be degraded. Increase software raid5 write speed raid openmediavault.

Originally i just wanted to do it for added storage, but if i installed my os to it, couldnt i see improved speeds. It seems that no matter if you use a hardware or a software raid controller, you should expect to lose performance when youre duplicating every write, which makes sense. The highpoint array still delivered very good low queue depth performance, but its. Its actually usually recommended to run hyperv in one big raid 10 array, put the os and vms all on direct storage. The theory that he is speaking of is that the read performance of the array will be better than a single drive due to the fact that the controller is reading data from two sources instead of one, choosing the fastest route and increasing read speeds. Software raid 1 with dissimilar size and performance drives. Synology strives to enhance the performance of our nas with every software update, even long after a product is launched. Raid 1 offers better performance, while raid 5 provides for more efficient use of the available storage space. The device is a lot slower than a single partition. I got a new notebook primary for cad and sketchup, but the performance is below aceptable even in 2d, i feel a lot of hiccups and slowdowns, and judging by the rest of the config i can only think on doing a raid to increase setup, or is there an alternative like dualboot especialy for autocad. General notes this page presents some tips and recommendations on how to improve the performance of beegfs storage servers. A common installation technique for relational database management systems is to configure the database on a raid 0 drive and then place the transaction log on a mirrored drive raid 1.

Disk mirroring, also known as raid 1, is the replication of data to two or more disks. Raid 1 is a data protection scheme that uses mirrored pairs of disks to protect data. The technote details how to convert a linux system with non raid devices to run with a software raid configuration. In general, software raid offers very good performance and is relatively easy to maintain. Below are some additional references from microsoft on some of their best practices for server performance. But i dont see the point of the physical test that you performed. Tuning your raid controller for maximum storage performance. The ssd optimization guide ultimate windows 8 and win7. Or use two ssds to mirror raid 1 your system drive in the event one drive fails the secondary drive will take over and the user is still up and running with no data loss.

You need at least twice as much disk space as the amount of data you have to mirror. I have tried this advice for my raid 5 array, but currently my write performance is about 1550mbs smaller file lower performance. Modify the value and enter a value of 1 hexadecimal. Reason for this is that the default tuning settings for ubuntu is.

Tuning raid performance has the air of a black art to storage administrators, with the perception that it can do more harm than good. Raid 10 provides the highest readandwrite performance of any one of the other raid levels, but at the expense of using two times as many disks. The sata controller on the motherboard is only sata i. Raid 1 is good because the failure of any one drive just means the array is offline for longer while it rebuilds, but can still be recovered and that the read performance is as good as raid 0. This combination often provides the best speed for the least number of drives. The highpoint array still delivered very good low queue depth performance. We will investigate the performance of the various cards in a raid 1 configuration in the same way that we investigated the performance of the cards in a raid 0 array. Just make sure to have proper cooling, as this card gets pretty hot under heavy io. Sql server raid configuration raid 10 sql authority. Raid 0 is mostly for increasing capacity and performance. Raid 5 data parity protection, interleaved parity with the teradata database, the two raid technologies that are supported are raid 1 and raid 5, but the recommendation is always to implement raid 1 as it provides the highest level of data protection. This rig is mostly for gaming and general use, so cpu cores ought to be free.

So after getting some community feedback on what disk configuration i should be using in my pool i decided to test which raid configuration was best in freen. The choice of performance hardware will be wasted if the software cannot or will not use it. Postgresql is highly configurable and has many options to improve its performance, obviously consuming. Raid 1 gives you double the read performance reads are interleaved across the drives but the same write performance.

These raid levels provide fault tolerance and can also increase performance. The ability to do feature analysis, design principle testing, and performance tuning. I currently have a proliant n40l with 4 seagate drives st3000dm0019yn166 which are 4k format, raid with 512k strip size. Mdadm is linux based software that allows you to use the operating system to create and handle raid arrays with ssds or normal hdds. Read about mdadm here, and read about using it here. Linux md raid is exceptionally fast and versatile, but linux io stack is composed of multiple independent pieces that you need to carefully understood to extract maximum performance.

To this end the operating system should have some performance tuning done to it if possible, an entire discussion itself. For example, a raid allocation on a disk might be 32 kb and you would think that all io to and from the disk is 32 kb, but if the cache block size is, say, 4 kb, then the minimum read or write to that device is 4 kb. Latest software can be downloaded from megaraid downloads to configure the raid adapter and create logical arrays use either ctrlh utility during bios post. Hardware ssd, pcie flash, and raid firmware and driver wiki.

Data striping raid 0 is the raid configuration with the highest performance, but if one disk fails, all the data on the stripe set becomes inaccessible. When the volume is created, use write through caching i. Lsi recommends using the writeback policy to achieve optimum performance in all raid 5 and raid 6 configurations because it can improve the performance of data redundancy generation. Proper array tuning means aligning the array stripe width such that the most frequently expected maximum io can be supported in a read form a single disk. As usual, the optimal settings depend on your particular hardware and usage scenarios, so you should use these settings only as a starting point for your tuning efforts.

Im speculating, but ill posit the largest factor affecting performance is the older sata 1 onboard controller working with raid1. Why does raid 1 mirroring not provide performance improvements. Ive played with software raid a lot and raid0 is unequivacably faster for single threaded reads. Many servers, especially databases like mysql, are dealing with hard drive io on every data insert, so in order to get much performance out of such databases with extensive amount of data inserts, it is critical to tune the io writes. Find answers to slow performance on a raid 1 from the expert community at experts exchange. The most popular caching program that we have seen and tested to date is samsungs own nvelo dataplex caching software. Software vs hardware raid performance and cache usage. But, some things ive just read state that software raid wont give the performance. Besides, putting the two halves of the mirror on the same. Slow performance on a raid 1 solutions experts exchange. Raid1 does load balancing, but it doesnt do stripped.

I guess my 3ware, adaptec, dell perc, lsi and hpcompaq di controllers must be junk then. Also before i go to a software raid i want to use iometer to get a baseline test do you know what i should enter in iometer to run a test. A lot of software raids performance depends on the cpu that is in use. Performance tuning guidelines for windows server 2012 r2. Tuning an ext34 filesystems journal and directory index for speed. Yes, linux implementation of raid1 speeds up disk read operations by a factor of. Introduction we will describe how to setup ntfs block size under windows system to achieve better write performance on software and hardware raid 5 and raid 6 arrays. It seems that no matter if you use a hardware or a software raid controller, you should expect to lose performance when youre duplicating every write. Software raid hands this off to the servers own cpu. Raid 6 is intermediate in expense between raid 5 and raid 1. However, tuning for performance is an entirely different matter, as performance depends strongly on a large variety of factors, from the type of application, to the sizes of stripes, blocks, and files.

Most consider the job done once the raid level is selected. Filesystem mount options that increase performance, such as noatime and barrier0. For the purposes of this article, raid 1 will be assumed to be a subset of raid 10. I have seen some raid 10 benchmarks in relation to raid 5, 6, and 0 but not raid 1. Optimizing your hard disk performance techrepublic. Hw and sw raid performance tunning on ntfs volumes. Performance tuning for software raid6 driver in linux. Tips and recommendations for storage server tuning beegfs. Raid 1 provides a redundant, identical copy of a selected disk. Best raid for sql server raid 0, raid 1, raid 5, raid 10. Dec 05, 2018 tuning guide for storagecraft software on servers. Any idea what could be causing this, or how to improve raid 5 performance. Performance optimization for linux raid6 for devmd2. Read performance is similar to raid 5 but write performance is worse.

The performance software used in our lab was tkperf on ubuntu 14. While the intel raid controller blows the software raid out of the water on sequential reads, surprisingly the windows software raid was better in nearly every other respect. Jan 06, 2008 matter of fact, ive never seen a benchmark showing a raid 1 card having improved raid 1 performance over a single drive, but i keep reading that if you have a good card, raid 1 can improve read performance. If your array is in normal mode not rebuilding, it should not affect the system performance. Software raid how to optimize software raid on linux using. Compared to independent disk drives, raid 1 arrays provide improved performance, with twice the read rate and an equal write rate of single disks. If you are using mdadm raid 5 or 6 with ubuntu, you might notice that the performance is not all uber all the time.

Interestingly, i also tried a 16disk raid 10 same disks plus a second lsi hba and the performance was 2400 mbs a 33% decrease from raid. Raid 10 vs two raid 1 pairs what is better performance wise. Configure antivirus software to bypass hyperv processes and directories. This variable you are referring to is related to raid rebuild speed.

You can always increase the speed of linux software raid 0156. Fourth reason is the inefficient locking decisions. Unless your performance is limited only to start times, we dont feel this a viable consideration. This article will describe the various options for setting the caches for raid controllers and hard disks.

All data written to the main disk in the array is also written to the mirror disk. This lack of performance of read improvement from a 2disk raid 1 is most definitely a design decision. Understanding raid performance at various levels storagecraft. If you manually add the new drive to your faulty raid 1 array to repair it, then you can use the w and writebehind options to achieve some performance tuning. I have scoured through articles written about tuning software and i have used linux software raid for over 10 years. These raid arrays are configured in a separate raid bios accessible on system bootup. Raid controller and hard disk cache settings thomas. This is making me lean towards software raid, based on your comment itd be nice to regain that boot time i lost going to hardware raid. Testing a single raid 1 disk and doubling the performance or using a data file that is half the size doesnt prove anything. Table 1 provides a summary of these points for an ideal environment. One more question on the software raid possibilities. Excellent performance with read and write raid 10 has advantage of both raid 0 and raid 1.

The random read performance test shows us how poorly software based raid scales as we ramp up the workload. Recently developed filesystems, like btrfs and zfs, are capable of splitting themselves intelligently across partitions to optimize performance on their own, without raid linux uses a software raid tool which comes free with every major distribution mdadm. To check out speed and performance of your raid systems, do not use hdparm. How to improve server performance by io tuning part 1. The raid6 device is created from 10 disks out of which 8 were data disks and 2 were paritydisks. Networking configuration can make a real difference to hyperv performance.

Ntfs performance tuning by disabling unneeded features and functions, you can improve the performance of ntfs. A raid 1 volume, or mirror, is a volume that maintains identical copies of the data in raid 0 stripe or concatenation volumes. Speeding up a filesystems performance by setting it up on a tuned raid0 5 array. For enterprises and users that demand uncompromising performance from their servers, check the figures below to find the most suitable choice. I had achieved the same for raid 1 with info found on the net, but how does one goes to achieve the same for a 6 disk raid 5 setup. I read here and then that small stripe size is bad for software and maybe hardware raid 5 and 6 in linux. This article explains which hyperv best practice items to control io operations and improve the performance of hyperv and virtual machines. Increase software raid5 write speed apr 10th 20, 11. Tune raid performance to get the most from your hdds. Raid 6 is used when data redundancy and resilience are important, but performance is not.

Ive noticed some performance issues with my 8drive software raid6. When running basic io tests ddoflagdirect 5k to 100g files, hdparam t, etc. To have a raid0 device running a full speed, you must have partitions from different disks. A raid 1 array is built from two disk drives, where one disk drive is a mirror of the other the same data is stored on each disk drive. I have, for literally decades, measured nearly double the read throughput on openvms systems with software raid 1, particularly with separate controllers for each member of the mirror set which, fyi, openvms calls a shadowset.

I am wondering if it is better to get 4 1 tb sata 7200 rpm drives in raid 10 or if its better to get 2 ssds in raid 1 and 2 sata 7200 rpm data drives in raid 1 performance wise. A cached ssd, on the other hand, is a solid state drive that may be purchased with a user installed caching program. But for the sake of learning i will try a software raid 1 as see if i notice a big difference. I get question about what configuration of redundant array of inexpensive disks raid i use for my sql servers the answer is short is. How to improve server performance by io tuning part 1 monitis. The file size was 900mb, because the four partitions involved where 500 mb each, which doesnt give room for a 1g file in this setup raid 1 on two mb arrays. But im wondering if theres anything i can do to improve the mdadm raid 5 performance. Just using two ssds in a raid 0 stripe can double drive performance at a minimal cost. A lot of software raids performance depends on the cpu. On my system i get the best performance using the value 8192.