Gadgetory

so I promise to do a video update when I had a chance to run the 8 o'seas e onyx series SSDs in raid zero so you can see I've got these hooked up to an LSI mega RAID fast path SSD optimized RAID controller and what fast PAP does is it actually allows SSDs to perform a little bit better so fast path is just a little little key that I have on there it also enables some advanced encryption features as well as the ability to use SSDs as a cache for a hard drive rate of rate so that's said this is a pretty cool card this is the 90 to 60 and it's it's actually a SAS I didn't unboxing of it it's a SAS 6 gigabit per second card but as you can see it's obviously compatible with SATA 2 SSDs I shouldn't even call it SATA 2 what I mean to say is SATA 3 gigabit per second so here I'll show you actually here why don't we take this video as an opportunity to show you how easy it is to set up a RAID controller card in a raid 0 configuration so first of all I want to show you some benchmarks here you can see that with this array we were able to achieve almost 700 megabytes per second read which honestly shouldn't be that impressive this card is capable of well over 1 gigabyte per second read with the right SSDs so that I was actually a little bit disappointed in but the right speeds are very impressive the right scaled almost linearly on these SSDs so we were able to achieve up to 450 megabytes per second on writes so I'll show you what I mean by all of this in just a moment here this is kind of interesting I wasn't having any challenges with the with the raid configuration before you know what I think it is well it looks like you get to see some real-time troubleshooting here I think we've just got the wrong IP address because I was using this at home so I have the the system IP wrong 1 9 2 1 6 8 3 1 8 5 do that and there we go so let me just log in here alright and now we're going to go into the the megabraid configuration so the reason I'm a little bit disappointed with the with the overall read speeds as you can see with well you were able to see you can see with a to drive array so this is using all the same rage configuration we were able to achieve 307 megabytes per second already now with SSDs typically with a good quality RAID controller like we have and and a good quality SSD you should see almost completely linear scaling so while these drives are rated for 125 megabytes per second reads maximum you can see with two drives we were actually seeing that these drives perform a little bit better than spec and they're scaling extremely well because only two drives yield such strong read results now this down here is the random performance so you can see even with eight drives do random performance doesn't change very much so we've only got about 6,000 I ops in 4k performance which is actually still very good compared to any hard drive I mean you got to sort of keep that in perspective but performance didn't really scale much from two drives all the way up to eight drives so you can see two drives we were seeing about 20 megabytes per second and then up to eight drives we see about 25 now with a deeper queue depth and a bigger array you do see more you do see better performance and what that means is that if you're multitasking a lot on a huge array like this you're going to see better performance and it will continue to scale versus if you're not multitasking and you're just reading and writing small 4k files now another thing that did scale really really well with adding more drives was the writes so you can see right I ups are almost 3x when we add four times as many drives so that's still reasonably good scaling so I just want to show you the numbers as we go through here so remember this is eight drives this is the run I just did like two seconds ago and then this one here is with two drives this is with four drives so you can see from two to four did not scale nearly as well so back to two up to four did not scale nearly as well in reads as from 1 to 2 because from 1 to 2 we got almost linear scaling but you can see that especially writes scaled incredibly well so our sequential writes doubled actually a little bit more than doubled and then our 4k writes more than doubled so very very efficient there and so then from 4 drives I went to 6 drives so once again you see quite limited scaling in some areas but again excellent scaling on the sequential right so that's where we're seeing just just huge improvements and then finally this is an 8 drive run that I did before I was using slightly better tweaked raid settings so that's probably actually the one I should be showing you more than more than any other one but but yeah that's how I was able to squeeze just a little bit more sequential read out of the whole thing and actually substantially better 4k random writes so anyway that was pretty much my video I think that what we've discovered here is that using 8 SSDs of very very low performance I mean the Onyx is a value SSD there's there's no two ways about it I think what we'd be better off with is using something like 4 to 6 higher performance SSDs something like a vertex - I mean vertex 2 right out of the box is going to outperform probably anywhere from two to three of these onyx SSDs so what I discovered running this experiment is that you're probably better off with fewer SSDs but higher performance ones so I'll just show you really quickly when you have when you have a premium raid card like this how easy and how quick it is to set up a raid array all you really do is go into actually you know what no I can't show you this because I wanted to actually boot up to the to the SSD raid array so no I can't wipe out my array but it's really fast you'll have to just believe me you click this button up here you select the drives you press raid 0 and then there are actually some options that you can config here so if I go into my virtual drive here I believe I can go to virtual drive and I can set all the virtual drive properties so these are some of the things that that you can tinker around with if you do set up an SSD raid array so I've set things up according to how LSI has recommended for the best fast path performance although some people do report better performance with no read ahead and some people do get better performance with a write back cache enabled as well as cached i/o it really varies depending on your SSD so you have to tweak and find out what works well with your controller and your SSD so thanks for checking out our little raid zero performance video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips