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Storage Performance Geekout

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This is a rather huge geekout, so if you’re not into drive performance on various machines, feel free to ignore this post. =) It’s original goal was to look at the performance difference between a 2009 Mac Mini, 2009 Mac Mini Server, and 2010 Mac Mini Server. It then grew to be “Let’s compare all the storage I have in my rack”.

In this, I’m going to be comparing the results from 5 different machines. They are:

  • Early 2009 Mac Mini (4GB RAM), single 320GB 5400 RPM Drive (Model: Fujitsu MHZ2120BH G1)
  • Late 2009 Mac Mini Server (4GB RAM), dual 500GB 5400 RPM Drives (Model: Hitachi HTS545050B9SA02) (RAID1)
  • Xserve 2009 (12GB RAM), dual 160GB 7200 RPM Drives (Model: WDC WD1602ABJS-43P5A0) (RAID1), and single 160GB 7200 RPM Drive (Model: WDC WD1602ABJS-43P5A0)
  • Mid-2010 Mac Mini Server (4GB RAM), dual 500GB 7200 RPM Drives (Model: Hitachi HTS725050A9A362) (In both single, and RAID1 configuration)
  • And for fun, Xserve 2009 (12GB RAM), Xsan 2.2.1 on 3 LUN (6 drive RAID5) Xserve RAID Data, single LUN (2 Drive RAID1) Xserve RAID Metadata.
  • For extra fun, Dell 2850 (5GB RAM), 6 72GB 15,000 RPM Drives (Model: Fujitsu MAX3073NC) in RAID10 (3 RAID1’s striped together).

All stats were created with bonnie++ 1.03d (1.03e will not build on 10.6.5 due to lack of support for O_DIRECT). All tests will include the bonnie++ parameters, as well as the results. The purpose of these tests is largely to see how various setups compare, and was largely prompted because of Splunk performance on various drive configurations. Splunk is largely reliant on Disk IO (IOPS mainly). Sadly I have no ability to test SSD performance. Perhaps at some point in the future. Please note, the graph below, is in logarithmic scale, so check out the labels for each bar, rather than looking at relative size (unless you think logarithmically).

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Drobo Review

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In December (on the 31st to be exact), I purchased a Drobo for myself to replace a home grown RAID I’d been using for years. The original RAID was a big SCSI enclosure that was built to hold 8 5.25″ drives, with a locking front. I had purchased a FW800 bridgeboard that supported 4 PATA (IDE) drives and was using 3 drives in JBOD. Gave me about 1TB of storage (2 300GB drives, and a 400GB drive). Overall, it worked well, but it was approaching 5 years old, and there was no redundancy at all with the data. And while none of the data was critical, it would have sucked had a lost it.

So, after much research, and a lot of doubting, I bit the bullet, and purchased a standard Drobo Gen 2 (FW800, and USB2 connectivity. Holds 4 3.5″ SATA drives). I couldn’t justify the price increase it would have cost to buy the Drobo S.

Along with the Drobo, I purchased 2 1.5TB WD “Green” drives. They’re 5900rpm drives, but they didn’t need to be really speedy since I wasn’t using them as primary storage for anything. They basically host movies and music for use around the house.

Once I received the Drobo, I popped the two drives in, and hooked it up to my server. Within a few minutes, everything was online, and it was up and working. At the time, my “server” was an old Powerbook G4, which seemed to have a flakey FW800 port (was seeing errors occasionally in the system.log with the FW800 cable supplied with the Drobo). Thinking it was the cable, I switched to a FW800 cable I had that had ferrites on both ends. This eliminated the errors (I have since tested the cable that came with the Drobo, and it works fine… just seems the FW800 port on the Powerbook was overly susceptible to EMI). I copied everything from my old enclosure to the Drobo, and it’s been working great since.

The unit is silent when the fan isn’t running. And when it is running, it’s not very loud at all (it’s a 120mm fan in the back). It seems to run during heavy access, and most likely is tied to the SMART temps reported by the drives. I’m sure if I had 4 drives installed, the fan would run more often, but the drives never heat up (touching the front of them with a knuckle never has them feel anything but room temp). But, as I said, I’m never heavily using them (not using them as video swap, or anything like that).

How does it perform?

Bonnie++ Results:

server.example.com 8G,,,26859,5,16138,2,,,42881,3,63.9,0,16,2302,18,+++++,+++,
2004,11,113,0,+++++,+++,48,0

So, I get about 27MB/sec write, and 43MB/sec read. And about 64 iops. While not great (the internal drives on my server get 59MB/sec write, and 110MB/sec read, and 212 iops), it again, isn’t about mass speed with this. I basically use it to server media to machines around the house.

So what does this all mean? It means if you’re looking for a fast, high performance external RAID array, you should probably look more at something like the Promise NS4600, which does a real RAID5, or RAID10. 4 2TB drives, and you’d have a pretty sweet array that could be used for FCP scratch when doing HD video. But, the Drobo will work perfectly fine with these numbers for SD video (which is 25mbs, or about 3MB/sec).

I really like the Drobo. It works great, and I like the fact that in the next couple months, when it fills up, I can just buy another drive, plop it in, and I’ll suddenly have more space (space is calculated as the combined storage of all drives installed, minus the size of the largest drive). So, if I buy another 1.5TB, I’d get another 1.5TB. If I bought a 2TB, I’d only gain 1.5TB (because the 2TB would then become the “redundancy” drive).

Add to that the fact that I haven’t had to deal with the Drobo AT ALL since I set it up, and we have something that’s really quite serviceable, and extremely useful. I deal with IT related stuff every day, and I don’t really want to come home to my array having failed, and struggle to get it back online. Now, it could be the Drobo fails at some point, and because of it’s proprietary format, I can’t get it back online without the help of Drobo support, but, so far, it couldn’t be simpler.

The only downside that I can see, is when you format the array, you say how big it should be. This allows for future expansion of the volume. In my case, I told it to be 16TB (so I could expand it as much as possible). But, the OS always sees it as 16TB. I would think it would be possible for the Drobo software to override this size, and give the OS a real size. But, maybe at some point that will happen.

[xrr rating=9/10] It’s a solid product, and it’s well worth the money simply for it’s simplicity, functionality, and diversity.

Links:
Drobo: http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo.php
Bonnie++ : http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/

New Server…

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Not sure if anyone knows, but previous to now, my server hosting this site was a Powerbook G4, 1.67ghz, with 2GB of ram, and an 80GB HD.

It ran 10.5 Server, and all and all, ran it pretty well. I was using Marc Liyanage’s PHP build (http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/PHP/), and that worked fairly well. Though, the 5.3.0 install was kinda odd. This computer also served as my weather station machine, file server, power monitor, etc.

Anyway, it worked, but it was rather slow to do any real crunching on (like elaborate SQL queries, etc). Or for that matter, running mod_deflate on my site. And while it’s power usage was pretty low, and it had a built-in UPS (it’s battery) it wasn’t as good as it could be. Also, had to add Cardbus USB card to add additional ports, and making any kind of timelapse movies from my webcam images was out of the question. So, it worked, but it was pretty loaded (load averaged about 20-40%).

So, all that in mind, Tara and I have been selling random crap on eBay the last few weeks, and managed to build up enough between that,

and me cashing out some vacation from work, to buy a brand new Mac Mini Server (also traded in my old personal powerbook for some store credit).

All and all, it’s sweet. It’s significantly faster, smaller, uses less power, and is more apt to be a server than an old powerbook. =) Sure, the picture to the left makes it look pretty messy (power supply, Keyspan USB-Serial adapter, serial cable from that to weather station), usb cable to webcam, usb cable to TED, firewire to Drobo), but I’m going to clean that up and put it all up on shelves above my desk. And yeah, the pictures in the background are of me as a kid.

Load average on the new system, about 2-4%. Not to mention, the RAM doubling in the new system (with the actual potential to go to 8GB at some point in the future. And being able to run 10.6 server, and I would imagine, 10.7 server as well (whenever it ships). It’s a speedy machine. I RAID1’d the two drives, so I’m not nearly as worried about a drive crashing at this point.

And since I never really talked about it, the Drobo is pretty nice as well. It’s not as fast as it could be, but that’s really not much of an issue. It’s mainly for storing media that we watch on the PS3, or laptops. So it’s doesn’t need to be a rocket, it just needs to work, and be reliable. Right now I’ve got two WD15EADS drives (1.5TB “Green” drives). They’re pretty nice, though I worry about the head parking overly aggressively. As you can see, it’s about 70% full, so I’ll probably buy another drive in the nearish future which will give me 3TB of storage. Not too bad given my homegrown only had 1TB. I’ll do more of a write up on the Drobo in the next week or two. I wanted to wait to write it up until I got the new server, as it acted kinda odd sometimes when it was hooked to the old Powerbook.

Here’s to a new week.

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