SSD RAID 10 IOPS Testing - H700 Perc RAID Card Testing R710

Recently we’ve been playing with H700 RAID cards with SSD’s. We have had some issues which will be outlined in future follow up posts with SSD’s & H700 Compatibilities.

6 x 256GB Crucial M4 Firmware 0309 all confirmed in a RAID 10 array.
Testing tool : Fio 1.38 64bit

Fio is quite easy to configure and setup in all major linux distribution. We are testing it on Debian which is quite easy to install J From CLI (command line interface) just run the following commands:

This will update the Package Index. The APT package index is essentially a database of available packages from the repositories defined in the /etc/apt/sources.list file.

To update the local package index with the latest changes made in repositories,
root@server:/# Apt-get update

This command will then install FIO from the remote repositories & any dependencies
root@server:/# Apt-get install fio

We then want to create the actual configuration file which will have all the variables for this test , because we are utilising SSD’s it’s a good idea to setup the configuration file with the following settings

The easiest way to create the configuration file is like this:
root@server:/# nano random.fio

Then you want to paste the following in:

[random]
rw=randread
size=1g
directory=/iops
iodepth=403
direct=1
blocksize=4k
numjobs=16
nrfiles=1
group_reporting
ioengine=sync
loops=1

The second last step is to create a folder where all the working/testing will take place in , in our case we created /iops in the following way:
root@server:/# mkdir /iops

The final step is the actual test J just run the application with the configuration file name trailing
root@server:/# fio random.fio

And your output should be something like this. I have highlights the main performance outputs for you in red to compare your results! So we got roughly 19,000IOPS @ 4K Reads J Quite fast if you ask me

random: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=403
…
random: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=403
Starting 8 processes
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
random: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 1024MB)
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [97.3% done] [34022K/0K /s] [8306/0 iops] [eta 00m:03s
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [98.2% done] [25875K/0K /s] [6317/0 iops] [eta 00m:02s
Jobs: 2 (f=2): [_r__r___] [100.0% done] [25381K/0K /s] [6196/0 iops] [eta 00m:00
random: (groupid=0, jobs=8): err= 0: pid=3884
read : io=8192MB, bw=75793KB/s, iops=18948, runt=110678msec
clat (usec): min=82, max=39244, avg=282.17, stdev=70.87
bw (KB/s) : min= 336, max=20720, per=18.60%, avg=14099.28, stdev=930.13
cpu : usr=2.51%, sys=32.11%, ctx=2077702, majf=0, minf=588
IO depths : 1=100.0%, 2=0.0%, 4=0.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
submit : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
complete : 0=0.0%, 4=100.0%, 8=0.0%, 16=0.0%, 32=0.0%, 64=0.0%, >=64=0.0%
issued r/w: total=2097152/0, short=0/0
lat (usec): 100=0.02%, 250=7.38%, 500=81.68%, 750=10.65%, 1000=0.14%
lat (msec): 2=0.10%, 4=0.01%, 10=0.01%, 20=0.01%, 50=0.01%
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=8192MB, aggrb=75792KB/s, minb=77611KB/s, maxb=77611KB/s, mint=110678 msec, maxt=110678msec
Disk stats (read/write):
dm-0: ios=2097110/1826990, merge=0/0, ticks=606753/2981152, in_queue=3673756, util=84.49%, aggrios=0/0, aggrmerge=0/0, aggrticks=0/0, aggrin_queue=0, aggrutil=0.00%
sda: ios=0/0, merge=0/0, ticks=0/0, in_queue=0, util=-nan%