Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 Five-Disk Benchmarks On Linux 4.1

Earlier this month I posted some Btrfs RAID 0/1 benchmarks on Linux 4.1 as a prelude to some larger Btrfs RAID benchmarks. Today the rest of those results are available with using five disks and testing Btrfs on this newest version of the Linux kernel while testing the RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 levels.

From the same Oracle Sun Fire server I used for the earlier Btrfs RAID Linux 4.1 benchmarks I finished off this latest round of Btrfs testing. I used five 300GB 10K RPM H106030SDSUN300G SAS drives; originally I planned to use six of these drives, but the sixth drive was acting up and appeared to be on its last leg. With the stock mount options of Btrfs, I tested the built-in RAID functionality in the following configurations:

- Single Disk
- Two Disk RAID0
- Two Disk RAID1
- Four Disk RAID0
- Four Disk RAID1
- Four Disk RAID5
- Four Disk RAID6
- Four Disk RAID10
- Five Disk RAID0
- Five Disk RAID1
- Five Disk RAID5
- Five Disk RAID6
- Five Disk RAID10

In the past on Phoronix I've published RAID 0/1/5/6/10 Btrfs benchmarks on four SSDs along with a broader Linux RAID file-system comparison and also compared the Btrfs native RAID abilities to mdadm. Since that testing, with the recent versions of the Linux kernel, the RAID 5 and RAID 6 support within Btrfs has got into better shape.

All of the disk benchmarks today were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. On the following pages are this latest Btrfs RAID test data. There isn't much to add beyond what the data shows, but will have additional commentary when carrying out comparison tests of the Btrfs RAID performance against other file-systems/configurations for this Sun Fire server.