RAID-0 vs iSCSI vs HDD

I had reason to set up some storage at the office recently. So, I got to experiment with regular HDD storage, iSCSI and RAID-0 configurations. The results proved to be rather interesting and will be useful for future reference.

The same machine was configured with a two-disk RAID-0 array, the single HDD storage, and as a iSCSI initiator. The iSCSI target was connected via a 1Gbps network over CAT-5e via a gigabit switch. The iSCSI target had to be configured with TCP window scaling disabled in order to achieve a high speed connection.

All results are obtained with regular bonniee++ benchmarking tool.

HDD

Version 1.97 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
XXX 8G 973 97 115588 9 49174 4 4013 65 118067 5 259.3 3
Latency 9549us 778ms 1391ms 113ms 321ms 763ms


RAID-0

Version 1.97 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
XXX 8G 1247 97 272885 14 122170 6 4006 96 333448 8 341.0 10
Latency 9564us 25945us 217ms 7244us 34189us 376ms


iSCSI

Version 1.97 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency 1 -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
XXX 8G 666 95 36609 3 24401 2 4598 96 90542 4 191.8 2
Latency 15935us 6439ms 4285ms 18451us 302ms 2075ms


There are some useful observations from this. The RAID-0 array has a higher read and write speed than any of the rest for both sequential and random access patterns. While the iSCSI device has the slowest read and write speed, its access speeds are still fairly acceptable. However, it has a significantly higher latency than the rest which makes it unsuitable for regular usage.

I’ve decided to configure the RAID-0 array for storage that requires high speed access as it has both high read/write speeds and low latency. The iSCSI storage is used only as backup storage, which is useful since it can be used to backup data across a network to a dedicated storage server. The regular HDD is used for regular OS storage.