4 ms·

This is really well written and I learned a bunch. I wonder how much money vendors make by selling hardware RAID when customers could get away with kernel RAID

This is really well written and I learned a bunch. I wonder how much money vendors make by selling hardware RAID when customers could get away with kernel RAID. Also, thank you for this bit! "All tests performed here are random access, because nearly any real-world storage workload is random access." Question for you smart people... is there a reason to use such an old Linux kernel version? They're testing on 4.15, which was released over 20 months ago. Would there be any appreciable difference on 5.6.4 or something in the 5.x range? Perhaps not since hard drives can't really improve much, but I'm curious.

Arnt 7y ago
Hint: You haven't read about any performance breakthrough in the past several years.
- Rafuino 7y ago
  Not in HDDs... there's been quite a bit of improvement in SSDs and new memory media in the past several years.
  - Arnt 7y ago
    Not in the linux kernel's block layer, which is what GP had in mind. The block layer has been able to deliver very close to 100% of the drives' stated bandwidth for many years now.
    - Rafuino 6y ago
      Who is GP?
jmg90 7y ago
LSI controllers (adapter cards really no better) for VMS Alpha used to go for a couple thousand list for a retail sub 500 dollar part lavishly upgraded with some firmware that ensured the margins remained as high as the system clock on our ES45s. Fifteen years elapsed before we got the same bandwidth inside a Xeon.... I've still got the above mentioned dual 3.GHz boxen in archive because after that failure we copied all the internal data and mothballed them in case. Furloughed a office lot of twenty thousand dollars workstations because of a shoddy poxy consumer grade aic we were probably missold in the first place has we not had the full pr moves made on us to forget that... NDA expired years ago and only said we wouldn't be beastly to Dell who have been transformed since then the better imo though I am still not buying
fulafel 7y ago
Linux 4.15 is in the latest Ubuntu LTS. (We're now just at the edge of the 2-year LTS release cycle, with 20.04 coming out RSN)

Arnt 7y ago

Hint: You haven't read about any performance breakthrough in the past several years.

Rafuino 7y ago
Not in HDDs... there's been quite a bit of improvement in SSDs and new memory media in the past several years.
- Arnt 7y ago
  Not in the linux kernel's block layer, which is what GP had in mind. The block layer has been able to deliver very close to 100% of the drives' stated bandwidth for many years now.
  - Rafuino 6y ago
    Who is GP?

jmg90 7y ago

LSI controllers (adapter cards really no better) for VMS Alpha used to go for a couple thousand list for a retail sub 500 dollar part lavishly upgraded with some firmware that ensured the margins remained as high as the system clock on our ES45s. Fifteen years elapsed before we got the same bandwidth inside a Xeon.... I've still got the above mentioned dual 3.GHz boxen in archive because after that failure we copied all the internal data and mothballed them in case. Furloughed a office lot of twenty thousand dollars workstations because of a shoddy poxy consumer grade aic we were probably missold in the first place has we not had the full pr moves made on us to forget that... NDA expired years ago and only said we wouldn't be beastly to Dell who have been transformed since then the better imo though I am still not buying

fulafel 7y ago

Linux 4.15 is in the latest Ubuntu LTS. (We're now just at the edge of the 2-year LTS release cycle, with 20.04 coming out RSN)