Software
Operating Systems
I was curious what the performance was of approaches available in both Linux and Windows, so my testing was done under Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS and Windows Server 2022. The system patches were up to date as of the beginning of April 2022.
Parity Storage Methods
Both Multiple Disk and Device Management (the latest meaning of mdadm) and Logical Volume Management (LVM) are methods for software RAID-5 block storage under Linux. These two methods, and hardware RAID, were tested with Ubuntu.
Windows has long had software RAID-5 support in the Disk Management UI or diskpart utility. In recent years, Microsoft added Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces does not exactly offer RAID in the conventional sense but does provide a way to create a virtual disk in a storage pool using “columns” and parity very reminiscent of RAID-5. I tested both methods as well as hardware RAID using the latest (2018) RAID hardware driver available for Windows from Broadcom for the 9260.
The rest of the document will use this nomenclature to indicate an operating system and parity method:
| Storage Method | Description |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu/HW | Ubuntu using a hardware RAID controller |
| Ubuntu/LVM | Ubuntu using LVM |
| Ubuntu/MD | Ubuntu using MDADM |
| Windows/HW | Windows using a hardware RAID controller |
| Windows/SW | Windows using conventional software RAID |
| Windows/SS | Windows using Storage Spaces |