The last time I tested software RAID 1 under NetBSD I wasn’t really satisfied with the performance. Especially file system operations were much slower than I expected. Resulting from that my current home server uses an Intel SRCS14L RAID Controller instead of software RAID.
I had considered also buying a new RAID controller for my future home server. Areca’s ARC-1210 looked like the best candidate. But the ARC-1210 is not exactly cheap (as expected) and unfortunately has a fan. As reducing the noise level was one of the main goals to buy new server hardware I was put off.
After some consideration I decided to give RAIDframe another try. Encouraged by David Brownlee’s benchmark results I ran a similar benchmark on my hardware. To do that I wrote a shell script which consecutively creates RAID 1 volumes and FFSv1 file systems with all the combinations of parameters listed in the table below. Each of the file systems is mounted (not using soft dependences) and benchmarked by extracting the tar archives with the NetBSD 4.0 sources to it. The time required to complete each of the benchmark runs is recorded afterwards. Below are the averages of the results of two runs of my test script, smaller time values imply better performance of course.
| Block size / Fragment size | 32 sectors per stripe unit | 64 sectors per stripe unit | 128 sectors per stripe unit |
| 8KB / 1KB | 285 seconds | 253 seconds | 239 seconds |
| 8KB / 2KB | 299 seconds | 263 seconds | 246 seconds |
| 8KB / 4KB | 305 seconds | 277 seconds | 261 seconds |
| 8KB / 8KB | 285 seconds | 269 seconds | 259 seconds |
| 16KB / 2KB | 290 seconds | 250 seconds | 230 seconds |
| 16KB / 4KB | 303 seconds | 271 seconds | 243 seconds |
| 16KB / 8KB | 327 seconds | 301 seconds | 277 seconds |
| 16KB / 16KB | 430 seconds | 306 seconds | 291 seconds |
| 32KB / 4KB | 288 seconds | 260 seconds | 241 seconds |
| 32KB / 8KB | 311 seconds | 287 seconds | 264 seconds |
| 32KB / 16KB | 437 seconds | 320 seconds | 295 seconds |
| 32KB / 32KB | 470 seconds | 437 seconds | 331 seconds |
Unsurprisingly I’m now using a RAID 1 volume with 128 sectors per stripe unit and file systems with a block size of 16KB and a fragment size of 2KB. I’m not sure whether these values always result in the best possible performance but they seem to work for David Brownlee and me.