Comments on: Dell DAS MD1000 Benchmarks

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:51:26 +0000

The numbers are “great” for the price of the system compared to other low-end direct attached storage. By no means are they a good representation of what can be achieved with a good quality system. Of course, it still is slow – compared to the theoretical maximum.

I’ve got better numbers using a 3ware card (instead of the Perc 5/e), and some have posted better numbers with the Perc 6.

I have heard the MD3000 suffers from the same bottleneck. Some have found bad controller boards in the unit itself, and others have posted far better numbers in Windows than in Linux – drivers?

Unfortunately I haven’t had the ambition to improve beyond the numbers I have as the throughput is secondary to the IOPS (which are fine) for me.

By: Gerg

Gerg — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:25:04 +0000

I’ve been trying to configure an MD100 and getting only somewhat better numbers than you are. What surprises me is that you call these numbers “great”. I was expecting *much* better and have been stumped tracking down the bottleneck.

Looking at the sequential read throughput you’re seeing 250MB/s with 4 drives that should be capable of about double that. And you’re seeing only 450MB/s with 14 drives which should be capable of saturating the x4 connection at 1.2GB/s (assuming you have a PCIe system). 450MB/s is the kind of throughput you should be getting with 4 decent drives.

Have you found in the past year any further information on why the MD1000 falls so far short of its theoretical potential?

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:05:03 +0000

No SATA benchmarks yet. Will soon though. I just shifted around some disks and added some 500GB SATA Seagate ES drives.

By: Goboxe

Goboxe — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:09:31 +0000

Do you have stats using SATA harddisks?

Thanks,
G

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 03:42:49 +0000

I will try to get some RAID 5 benchmarks up pretty soon.