RAID-5 Hardware and Software Methods Compared

Hardware

The Computer

That “certain computer” was a recently acquired ASUS PRIME B460M-A R2.0 motherboard (Intel H470) with an Intel Celeron G5905. The processor is a 3.5 GHz 10th-generation Comet Lake device with two cores and no hyper-threading. OS storage was a 500 GB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe 1.2 M.2 SSD with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Two 8 GiB DDR4-2933 DIMMs provided RAM.

The Hard Drives

I have some spare 7200 rpm Western Digital Black Mobile (2.5″) disks with a 750 GB capacity (model WD7500BPKX). I tested four of them for surface defects and used them to conduct all the following performance assessments.

Hardware RAID Controller

My testing had to cover software and hardware approaches. To accommodate the hardware tests, I used an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i controller. The controller is a venerable PCIe 2.0 x8 card with a maximum throughput of 4 GB per second. That is more than enough for my four SATA 3.0 hard drives and their aggregate burst rate of 2.4 GB per second. It has an actual RAID processor on it — an LSI 2108 PowerPC device running at 800 MHz. Some so-called RAID controllers are merely SATA controllers that support RAID in software; this is not one of those. When I was not testing hardware RAID, this controller was removed from the computer.

Just as an aside, the -4i version of this controller (with a single internal interface supporting four SATA devices) is available on eBay at the time of this writing for under $20. Even the aforementioned single-point-of-failure dude could afford a spare, I think.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *