Linux RAID Performance On Dual NVMe SSDs

Here are our latest Linux RAID benchmarks using the very new Linux 4.16 kernel while using two high-end Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe solid-state drives with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Using MDADM Linux soft RAID were EXT4, F2FS, and XFS while Btrfs RAID0/RAID1 was also tested using that file-system's integrated/native RAID capabilities.

As some fresh Linux RAID benchmarks were tests of Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on a single Samsung 960 EVO and then using two of these SSDs in RAID0 and RAID1. Tests were done using the Linux 4.16 Git kernel on 24 March and using the latest file-system user-space tools found in the Bionic archive for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

During the testing each file-system was tested with its default mount options. This multi-disk Linux benchmarking should serve for some complementary figures to the recent Linux 4.16 HDD/SSD EXT4/F2FS/Btrfs/XFS testing from those slower storage devices.

The Samsung 960 EVO 500GB (MZ-V6E500) has a Samsung Polaris controller, 512MB LPDDR3 cache, sequential reads up to 3200MB/s, sequential writes up to 1800MB/s, random reads up to 330k IOPS, random writes up to 330k IOPS, and an average power consumption of 5.4 Watts. Samsung backs the 960 EVO SSDs with a three year / 200 TBW warranty and a rated reliability of 1.5 million hour MTBF.

This testing is quite straight-forward so let's jump straight to the numbers.