Btrfs RAID vs. Linux Software RAID Benchmarks On Linux 4.7

Earlier this month I carried out some 4-disk Btrfs RAID benchmarks using four SATA 3.0 SSDs. Those tests were done using the Btrfs built-in RAID capabilities while today are some comparison tests against those numbers when using the Linux Software RAID setup via mdadm.

This Btrfs RAID vs. Linux Software RAID (mdadm) testing is a continuation of the earlier standalone benchmarks. The comparison of these two competing Linux RAID offerings were done with two SSDs of RAID0 and RAID1 and then four SSDs using RAID0, RAID1, and RAID10 levels. The drives used for testing were four OCZ/Toshiba Trion 150 120GB SSDs. The stock Btrfs file-system mount options were used during testing as were the mdadm settings.

All of these Linux RAID benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The system was running Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 in its current development form paired with the Linux 4.7.0 stable kernel.