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Going from QD 16 to 32 does not make a significant difference. At QD 16~32 we seem to have found the upper limit of what the 4 NVMe devices are capable of. This feature is particularly useful after cloning an old disk with bad sectors to a new disk. sudo ntfsfix -n /dev/sda5 A ntfsfix has another useful switch -b or -clear-bad-sectors for clearing the list of bad sectors. Some graphs with the results of the IOps and CPU utilization. To perform a dry-run where ntfsfix doesn’t write anything but only shows what would have been done, use the -n or -no-action option.

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In addition you can download my Open Office spreadsheet I used to generate the graphs and process the data. You can also download the JSON output from fio here: Short answer? The MegaRAID controller is much faster in RAID-10 mode and also saves up to 30% of CPU cycles on the Linux machine. RAID-10 was set-up using this command: mdadm -create -level=10 -raid-devices=4 /dev/md0 /dev/nvme0n1 /dev/nvme1n1 /dev/nvme2n1 /dev/nvme3n1 fio The RAID-10 array was created using storcli storcli64 /c0 add vd type=raid10 drives=252:4,6,8,10 pdperarray=2 mdadadm setup

QD=1, 4, 8 and 16 4k random write performance.

Benchmarking setupīenchmarking will be done using fio and the main elements we are looking for: We however found out that this eats up so many CPU cycles that it wasn’t feasible to use in production for our purposes.

With mdadm we also looked into RAID-5/6 to have more usable space.

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I wanted to benchmark Linux’s software RAID against the Broadcom controller to see if it would be faster and save us the expensive CPU cycles. This chipset supports NVMe devices in various RAID modes. We mainly use the Samsumg PM983 (1.92TB) devices and I started to look around if there is a hardware solution which could offload the RAID computation to a dedicated SoC so it wouldn’t eat up our CPU cycles.Īfter searching I found the Broadcom SAS3916 chip which is on the MegaRAID 9516-16i controller from Broadcom.

It is expensive on the CPUs (Dual AMD Epyc 48-core).

This works great! But I wasn’t satisfied with the performance for a few reasons: In the past years I’ve said goodbye to hardware RAID controllers and mainly relied on software solutions like mdadm, LVM, Ceph and ZFS(-on-Linux) for keeping data safe.Īt PCextreme we use hypervisors with local NVMe storage running in Linux’s mdadm software RAID-10.

Softraid linux