I was doing a clear out of some paper work and came across these write performance tests which I did a few years back on an HP DL380 G5 with a p400 RAID controller.

• 4 drive RAID10 = 144MB/s (~72MB/s per drive)
• 4 drive RAID0 = 293MB/s (~73MB/s per drive)
• 8 drive RAID0 = 518MB/s (~64MB/s per drive)
• 8 drive RAID5 = 266MB/s (~38MB/s per drive)
• 8 drive RAID6 = 165MB/s (~28MB/s per drive)
• 8 drive RAID10 = 289MB/s (~72MB/s per drive)

The “per drive” is data being written per active data drive, excluding any RAID overheads.

I inferred from the above that the p400 RAID controller maxes out at around 518MB/s as it is unable to saturate 8 drives in a RAID0 array (64MB/s vs 72MB/s per drive). Not sure if this is a controller throughput or PCIe bus limitation.

Eitherway, this testing was (I think) done on Ubuntu 10.x or 12.x with pretty bog standard settings using a simple command such as:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/cciss/c0d0 bs=1024k

I thought I’d capture these figures here since I have no where else to save them.