4-Disk Btrfs RAID Benchmarks On Linux 4.7

Going along with the recent Linux 4.7 file-system benchmarks, here are some tests of Btrfs' built-in RAID functionality when tested on the Linux 4.7 kernel across four SATA SSDs.

For this Btrfs RAID testing from the latest Linux stable kernel tests were done on a single SSD, two SSDs in RAID0, two SSDs in RAID1, four SSDs in RAID0, four SSDs in RAID1, and four SSDs in RAID10. RAID5/RAID6 on four SSDs wasn't tested due to the recent news of these RAID levels in the Btrfs code being fatally flawed and unsafe. OCZ Trion 120GB SATA 3.0 SSDs were used for all of the Btrfs RAID tests on Linux 4.7.

Due to the significant time required to conduct these tests, this is just the first part of a series of modern Linux RAID benchmarks. Additional upcoming articles extending these results will show performance figures when using ZFS RAID with ZFS On Linux for the same systems/disks as well as looking at the Btrfs RAID performance when using MDADM rather than the RAID support built into the file-system. I may also do some RAID tests with other Linux file-systems and also seeing how Linux 4.8 changes the file-system/RAID performance game.

The stock mount options were used during all of the RAID Btrfs testing in this article. The Phoronix Test Suite was used to automate all of the Linux disk benchmarks for this article.