Benchmarking Hardware RAID vs. Linux Kernel Software RAID

"The main surprise in the first set of tests, on RAID-5 performance, is that block input is substantially better for software RAID; ext3 got 385MB/sec in software against 330MB/sec in hardware. The hardware dominates in block output, getting 322MB/sec aginst the 174MB/sec achieved by software for aligned XFS, making for a 185% speed increase for hardware over software. These differences in block output are not as large when using the ext3 filesystem. Block rewrite is almost identical for ext3 in software and hardware, whereas the rewrite difference becomes 128MB/sec to 109MB/sec for hardware to software respectively when using XFS."

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