The FreeBSD Diary |
|
(TM) | Providing practical examples since 1998If you buy from Amazon USA, please support us by using this link. |
|
What RAID-1 setup should I use for FreeBSD 6.0?
29 December 2005
|
||||||||||||
|
This article will highlight the disk drive tests I ran on my ASUS A8V Deluxe. I'm about to set this machine up to do various things, including cross compiling (which I wrote about back in October). I still haven't finished what I wanted to do, which is set up this machine with RAID-1 running FreeBSD 6.0. When I started, 6.0 had not yet been released. Now I'm about to redo some of my work and expand the scope slightly. Here is what I plan to do. I have some SATA and some IDE drives that I'm going to test on various configurations to see what setup gives me the fastest results. I don't expect the differences to be huge. This isn't scientific. I'm just using the hardware I have. I will be testing the various configurations shown in the table below:
The columns represent the type of RAID-1 I will be using. The mainboard offers both SATA and IDE RAID-1.
The 3Ware 7006-2 does only IDE, not SATA.
I will also be testing And for kicks and giggles, I'll also try just a plain old SATA and plain old IDE (i.e. no RAID-1). All testing was done on the same machine. For each test I installed 6.0-RELEASE, did a cvsup of both the ports and source tree. Then I did a build world and upgraded to 6.0-STABLE. Each cvsup was against the same image of the repository (i.e. my local cvsup server, which I did not update during the course of this testing) to ensure each system was running against the same STABLE. With the system running on 6.0-STABLE, I then installed PostgreSQL 8.1 (along with some other packages), and ran a simple test: I am interested only in the elapsed time. I don't care about anything else. I want throughput. And I want it fast. I could have used a snapshot. I didn't. I could have used some other test. I didn't. I used what I had and did a test that is both disk intensive and CPU intensive. FYI: the FreshPorts database I'm using is the daily backup taken at 29 Dec 2005 at 03:41. The file is about 526MB. At the time of the test, these packages were installed: $ pkg_info bash-3.0.16_1 The GNU Project's Bourne Again SHell bison-1.75_2,1 A parser generator from FSF, (mostly) compatible with Yacc cvsup-without-gui-16.1h_2 General network file distribution system optimized for CVS gettext-0.14.5 GNU gettext package gmake-3.80_2 GNU version of 'make' utility joe-2.8_5 Joe's own editor libiconv-1.9.2_1 A character set conversion library m4-1.4.4 GNU m4 postgresql-client-8.1.1 PostgreSQL database (client) postgresql-contrib-8.1.1 The contrib utilities from the PostgreSQL distribution postgresql-server-8.1.1_1 The most advanced open-source database available anywhere |
||||||||||||
|
Special thanks to my local computer store
|
||||||||||||
|
I want to mention a local computer store, which I only just discovered. Over the Top Computing is only about 3km from my house, less if I cycle there. I dropped by there a few days before Christmas to buy a USB cable, and would up getting an external SATA HDD enclosure and the HDD to go into it. Not to mention a laptop drive/IDE convertor (just in case). I happened to ask them if they knew where I could get a couple of drive trays for an Antec Sonata case. They did. They had some in the back. And the special screws to go with them. BONUS!
Why is this relevant to this article? I'm using those trays now. It's much easier to swap drives around than traditional drive mounts. Drive rails would be nice, but they don't have the sound dampening provided by those rubber o-rings that you can see. The drive and screws touch only the rubber, not the tray. That reduces vibration and noise. Nice feature. |
||||||||||||
|
OK, so where are the results?
|
||||||||||||
|
I have only partial results. I plan to post at least one set of results per day over the next 6 days. Watch this space.
1 The two SATA drives used for the above were:
2 The two IDE drives used for the above were:
3 The two IDE drives used for the above were: 4 The original tests were mistakenly done against 6.0-RELEASE. The following result are against 6.0-STABLE:
The times shown in a particular column represent each test run. The last number in a particular cell of the table is the average of the numbers above it. So far, SATA onboard rules. But to be fair, each SATA drive has its own cable. The single IDE cable is shared by two drives (that is the only setup for IDE RAID on this main board). The last update occurred at: April 07 2019 17:32:11. I just thought of something else I could try: compare i386 against amd64. I may do that if I have time. |
||||||||||||
