[NTLUG:Discuss] Fusion-io vs 6xSSD RAID0 vs SASboy RAID0+1

[Chris Cox]

The folks at phoronix have a test suite that's useful for at lest some
comparing (truth be told, it's pretty obvious that they don't have a
clue about benchmarking at all).  Anyhow, just because it's considered
somewhat ubiquitous and it's easy to setup and run, I decided to compare
3 drives:

1. HP 160GB IO Accelerator (essentially a Fusion-io 160GB iodrive)
2. An SB40c raid0 P400 smartarray of 6 x 60GB HP SSDs (not sure of oem)
3. A Nexsan SASBoy with 14 x 600G 15K SAS drives in a raid0+1 config.

Apart from the IO accelerator, a ~300G drive was exposed... all used
ext2 with noatime.

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=cjcox-8115-1185-23153

I guess the main thing is that the iodrive is the "real deal"
performance wise.  However the SSDs feel really fast even though the
SASBoy took it in many of the benches (better IOPS).

So... anyway, there's a general lack of good comparative benchmarks out
there... so at least now there's something.

Cost wise... it's a toss up between the SASBoy and the SB40c array (that
just a Smartarray P400 and 6 bays for use with a c7000/c3000
Bladesystem).  I'd probably go with the SASBoy just because of disk size
(might cost similar to the SB40c array, but has a LOT more space).

The IO Accelerator (iodrive)... well.. the problem is NO OPEN SOURCE
driver.  Yes... these guys simply are NOT serious about Linux (at all).
So... yes, I did get a benchmark, but if I were to upgrade to the latest
(name your distro) version of Linux, the benches for it all go to ZERO
(N/A).

I decided to release this without doing the two remaining tests... which
oddly enough, will surprise you in some areas:

A. SATABoy 14 x 1TB RAID0+1
B. SATABoy 14 x 1TB RAID6


Enjoy,
Chris