Thecus N7700PRO Network Storage Server
Aug 22nd, 2010 | By AnthonyUnlike JBOD and RAID 0, RAID 5 combines both speed and redundancy. A RAID 5 array stripes data and parity across each disk. Those that are concerned with data integrity have likely heard of RAID 1, mirroring. It’s generally slower as the data needs to be written onto both disks. With RAID5 you get the advantage of speed and redundancy. Total storage is the combined total number of all disks minus one as redundancy where parity is distributed over all disks in the array. RAID 5 is perhaps the cheapest way to boost hard disk performance while keeping data safe.
By design, RAID 5 arrays are slower than RAID 0 or JBOD as every write requires each disk to calculate and update parity information and the necessary overhead for redundancy. As expected, our RAID 5 results for the N7700Pro placed behind RAID 0 at 66.2 MB/s.
When testing caching, much like with JBOD and RAID 0, we see an enormous jump in performance due to cache. Re- Writer throughput averages at 89.6 MB/s.
It tends to be that generally the difference between separate RAID levels is most reflected in the write tests. Four our Reader and Re- Reader tests results were fairly consistent throughout.
Read throughput in the RAID 5 configuration measured 83.6 MB/s and throughput in our Re- Reader test measured 85.5 MB/s.