{"id":264,"date":"2008-05-23T12:02:17","date_gmt":"2008-05-23T19:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/?p=264"},"modified":"2008-05-23T17:57:57","modified_gmt":"2008-05-24T00:57:57","slug":"disk-benchmarks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/2008\/05\/23\/disk-benchmarks\/","title":{"rendered":"Disk Benchmarks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently decided that I needed more space to backup\/archive data. So, I went out and bought a terabyte external drive ($240 at Costco). This drive is a WD MyBook Studio<\/a>, which happens to come with USB<\/a>, FireWire<\/a>, and eSATA<\/a> connections. I started to wonder how different those connections really<\/em> are. The theoretical bandwidth of each is 60MB\/s, 50MB\/s, and 384MB\/s, respectively.<\/p>\n

First of all, I could have sworn my motherboard had a eSATA connector, but it doesn’t. So, that’s out.<\/p>\n

I decided to do some benchmarking with Bonnie++<\/a>. This seems to be the standard Linux disk benchmarker. I used the default configuration for all the tests, since I figure they knew what they were doing when they decided what the defaults were.<\/p>\n

After seeing an FAQ about benchmarking RAID<\/a>, I decided to also try tiobench<\/a>. It tests multithreaded IO performance. I decided to look at 2 threads doing sequential reads and writes.<\/p>\n

Then, I started to wonder how these stacked up against my internal drives. SATA is back, but internal, and with a different disk on the end. I have two internal drives, both 400 GB, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache. They are used along with the Linux software RAID stuff<\/a> to create a RAID 1<\/a> (for even moderately important stuff) and a RAID 0<\/a> (a big bit bucket).<\/p>\n

I also tried a straight-up non-RAID partition on an internal disk (and I had to temporarily degrade my RAID to do it—I hope you appreciate this). The last tests I did were on my laptop and its 60 GB, 5400 RPM disk.<\/p>\n

Here’s what I came up with. In all cases, larger numbers are better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Disk Benchmarking Summary<\/caption>\n
Disk<\/th>\nBonnie Block Read (MB\/s)<\/th>\nBonnie Block Write (MB\/s)<\/th>\nBonnie Seek (\/s)<\/th>\ntiobench Read (MB\/s)<\/th>\ntiobench Write (MB\/s)<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
SATA non-RAID<\/td>\n70<\/td>\n54<\/td>\n250<\/td>\n44<\/td>\n46<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SATA RAID 1<\/td>\n53<\/td>\n45<\/td>\n366<\/td>\n54<\/td>\n37<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SATA RAID 0<\/td>\n62<\/td>\n89<\/td>\n207<\/td>\n43<\/td>\n56<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
External USB<\/td>\n32<\/td>\n29<\/td>\n172<\/td>\n29<\/td>\n28<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
External Firewire<\/td>\n37<\/td>\n33<\/td>\n188<\/td>\n32<\/td>\n32<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Laptop internal<\/td>\n20<\/td>\n23<\/td>\n94<\/td>\n18<\/td>\n18<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

[Intel D975XBX motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo 6600, 2GB RAM, Ubuntu Hardy, relatively idle system, ReiserFS 3.6 partitions. Laptop is a Pentium M 1.86 GHz, 512 MB RAM, Ubuntu Hardy, idle, EXT3 filesystem.]<\/p>\n

So… what did we learn from that?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I’m too lazy (and non-visual) to bother making useful graphs in situations like these.<\/li>\n
  2. USB 2.0 and Firewire are close enough in speed that it’s not worth mentioning.<\/li>\n
  3. Damn, I wish I had eSATA on my motherboard to see how that fared.<\/li>\n
  4. If possible, keep your disks inside the computer where they belong. The external performance is pretty impressive, but much slower than internals.<\/li>\n
  5. … unless your other option is a slow laptop drive, then the externals start to look pretty snappy. I didn’t try the external connected to the laptop<\/em>, though. There might be a processor\/bus bottleneck.<\/li>\n
  6. The RAID arrays aren’t nearly as fast as I thought they’d be. This could be a result of the Linux software RAID slowing things down. I have never used hardware RAID controllers (either the ones on many motherboards or dedicated cards). <\/li>\n
  7. Seriously… who’s stealing all my RAID performance? I want it back!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Edit [05\/23]: I feel I should add: All benchmarks are crap. They are positively correlated with the thing you want and call “performance”, but are definitely not directly related.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I recently decided that I needed more space to backup\/archive data. So, I went out and bought a terabyte external drive ($240 at Costco). This drive is a WD MyBook Studio, which happens to come with USB, FireWire, and eSATA connections. I started to wonder how different those connections really are. The theoretical bandwidth of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}