Another Record Broken: 6 Gb SAS, 16 SSDs, 3.4 GB/s!

Benchmark Results: I/O Performance

The new LSI 9260-8i might not have been optimized for a database type workload yet, as it fails to deliver the performance level of Adaptec’s RAID 5805. We found the simpler 9210-8i from LSI more impressive in this benchmark, as it beats the Adaptec card, delivering almost 45,000 I/O operations per second. The database benchmark consists of 67% read and 33% write access using only 8 KB blocks.

Once we switch to the file server scenario, the cached and fully-featured MegaRAID 9260-8i does better, outperforming both its little brother and the Adaptec RAID 5805. The file server benchmark pattern is based on many different block sizes between 512 bytes and 64 KB, with 80% read and 100% random operation. You need an intelligent engine to optimize this for type of access.

What a result! The Web server test does not involve any write operations, which is favorable for performance. LSI’s uncached 9210-8i blows away the two others, but keep in mind that the RAID 0 is rather insecure. All of these benchmarks should be taken as experimental, providing an outlook on the possible performance levels, rather than representing a truly useful scenario.

Both LSI cards are much faster in our workstation benchmark pattern, delivering 54-73% better performance than the same SSDs on the Adaptec RAID 5805.

Please read the article Tom’s Storage Charts 2009: A New Test Environment for detailed information on the benchmarks.