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Running A Btrfs RAID Array Across Four USB 3.0 Flash Drives

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  • Running A Btrfs RAID Array Across Four USB 3.0 Flash Drives

    Phoronix: Running A Btrfs RAID Array Across Four USB 3.0 Flash Drives

    My benchmarking entertainment this weekend, besides getting to benchmark with a sledgehammer, was testing out Btrfs RAID 0/1/5/6/10 arrays across a set of four USB 3.0 flash drives.

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Hey Michael, were you still so drunk from your "smoke detector night" that you tried to make RAID arrays with USB keys!

    Out of joke it's very interesting. I am kind of disappointed with the RAID5 being that bad... very strange.

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    • #3
      There's some overhead from USB mass storage protocols and conversion layer. I suspect the raid0/1 speed comes from usb drive's internal cache being in use. This benchmark is quiet silly. Don't do that :F

      I wish somebody paid Phoronix for adding FAT32 to usb benchmarks. It's so dumb that years have passed and we stilll don't know if ext2 or ext4 is faster or slower than FAT on usb flash.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by caligula View Post
        I wish somebody paid Phoronix for adding FAT32 to usb benchmarks. It's so dumb that years have passed and we stilll don't know if ext2 or ext4 is faster or slower than FAT on usb flash.
        Pretty much the main reasons you'd want FAT32 for a flash drive is low CPU overhead and OS compatibility. I'm not sure it's even worth testing.
        Last edited by schmidtbag; 17 August 2015, 03:10 PM.

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        • #5
          I love this test! But, a few words of caution. USB flash drives are often made with flash that has very large blocks and you need to make sure your raid stirpe size takes this into account. Then you have to make sure your FS understands that. And then, you need a workload that doesn't do a lot of small writes. Fail any of those and you're not going to see good performance.

          Also, FAT32 performance is generally pretty poor on anything.

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          • #6
            I had a plan to build a cheap server with USB 3.0. I'm very disappointed by the poor performance. I will need to invest a bit more for SATA disk then.

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            • #7
              This was a weird test. Looks fun though.

              Personally I use exFAT on my USB sticks; better than FAT32, and works on both Windows and Linux (with FUSE).

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              • #8
                Originally posted by xeekei View Post
                This was a weird test. Looks fun though.

                Personally I use exFAT on my USB sticks; better than FAT32, and works on both Windows and Linux (with FUSE).

                I do the same. Also, all of my External HDDs are exFAT

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                • #9
                  I want to see btrfs results for raid1/5/6 data/metadata and then while doing it pulling a usb drive.
                  (Maybe induce failure by a kernel test module).
                  There is not much use in raid if it locks up the system when shit happens.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Ardje View Post
                    I want to see btrfs results for raid1/5/6 data/metadata and then while doing it pulling a usb drive.
                    (Maybe induce failure by a kernel test module).
                    There is not much use in raid if it locks up the system when shit happens.
                    Well, they've been running btrfs through power failure scenarios to try and find bugs. Clearly there's been some. Phoronix reported this about 10 days ago.

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