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SSD DC S3500 Workload Characterization in RAID Configurations
December 2013 White Paper
329903-001US 9
5.0 RAID 1
5.1 Test System Specifications¹
The system used for RAID 1 testing include the following:
• Intel
®
R2208GZ4GC-IDD 2U rack mount server
• Intel
®
S2600GZ server board
• 2x Intel
®
Xeon
®
E5-2690 8-core CPUs (2.9 GHz)
• Intel
®
C602 chipset
• 192GB DDR3-1333 memory
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2*, 64-bit
• LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i* controller card
• 2x up to 8x Intel
®
SSD DC S3500 Series 480GB drives
BIOS configuration changes:
• Hyper-Threading disabled²
RAID controller configuration:
• 256KB Striping (default)
• No Read-Ahead³
• Write-Through³
• Direct I/O
Windows Drive Configuration:
• Basic disk
• GUID partition table
• Simple volume
• Use full available space
• NTFS format
Test Software configuration:
• IOMeter 2009.10.22
• 1x worker per drive in RAID set⁴
Notes:
1. The system was selected to make sure the performance of the RAID card and the SSDs would not
be inhibited by the server.
2. Hyper-Threading is disabled in this test system specifically due to additional latency introduced
during benchmark testing. In any practical application, Hyper-Threading would NOT be disabled.
3. In the configuration of the RAID set, No Read Ahead and Write-through are used due to the speed
of the SSDs. Read and write caching was designed for use with HDDs. Caching with SSDs introduces
additional overhead thus interfering with the SSDs performance.
4. One thread, or worker, per drive was used in order to simulate the manner in which many
applications utilize storage and also to attempt to saturate the communication channels to the SSDs.