When considering server performance, Raid is the most common way to achieve disk subsystem performance. When you are on a budget, the choices are very limited. But isn’t that when your creativity hits the roof?

We needed cost-effective servers for virtualized environment. So we ran some hard drive benchmarks to see what we can extract.

We could use iometer or some other better mechanism of testing. But we simply wanted a quick and simple test.

So here are some numbers:

Note that on first look Raid-5 appears to offer the best performance on this system. Let’s see if this holds true in a more realistic scenario. For further testing we started two threads, one reading and another writing. However they started one after another. Here are the numbers:

Now how about read performance with two threads:

Looking at these numbers, it is reasonable to conclude that Raid-10 offers a much more consistent performance with concurrent disk activity. Although these numbers do not consider all the situations however they consistently work for us.