RAID-1+0 Performance with SoftRAID 5

RAID 1+0 uses a striped pair of mirrors for a higher fault tolerance than RAID-5; at least one drive can fail and possibly two (depending on which drives fail).

Tested with very fast hard drives.

Performance of RAID 1+0

The spike at end has to do with either OS X or drive block mapping behavior and should be ignored.

Performance of a 4-drive RAID-1+0 should be similar to a 2-drive RAID-0 stripe. Performance of a 8-drive RAID-1+0 should be similar to a 4-drive RAID-0 stripe.

The performance is at high levels with both 4 and 8 drive arrays. The decline in drive performance over the capacity is somewhat muted with RAID 1+0 due to some overhead for the RAID.

Tested with DiskTester on the late 2013 MacBook Pro in dual OWC Thunderbay enclosures, each on its own Thunderbolt port. SoftRAID 5 beta.

disktester run-area-test --iterations 5 --test-size 4G --delta-percent 5

RAID 1+0 performance with 4 and 8 hard drives, SoftRAID 5 beta
disktester run-area-test --iterations 5 --test-size 4G --delta-percent 5