ReadSpeed - good for testing server performance?

[garethw]

Hi All,

I'm doing some testing on a couple of servers and want to try and work out what my "best" configuration is going to be for disks. It's an older HP ML350 G6 server with the onboard RAID controller (P410i).

I am currently using phoronix, installed on Ubuntu on a USB stick to test the io performance of the disks but am wondering if ReadSpeed might be a better tool for the job.

If anyone is interested I am currently testing 2 x Kingston SSD's and want to test the following to find the best performance;
RAID Card in RAID0, individually and as a pair, RAID1 as a pair then
SATA controller using software RAID0 and RAID1 then maybe RAIDZ too
(I don't intend to use 0, just curious)

Any thoughts?

 

[PHolder]

You know what they say, "measure twice and cut once". So if you don't have any measurements then you have no basis to make a decision. Certainly I expect ReadSpeed would be able to give you such a measurement tool.

 

[AlanD]

I would expect the RAID card to give better performance than software RAID, and it would offload the processing from the CPU. Whilst ReadSpeed should tell you how the disks are performing, I think it would check each disk individually, not the performance of the array.