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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