Intel SSDSC1NB240G401, SSDSC2BB600G401 5.0 RAID 1

Intel

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SSD DC S3500 Workload Characterization in RAID Configurations

December 2013 White Paper

329903-001US 9

5.0 RAID 1

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 ad ditional latency introduced

during benchmark testing. In any practical application, Hype r -Threading would NOT be disabled.

3. In the configuration of the RAID set, No Read Ahead and Write-through ar e us e d d ue to the speed

of the SSDs. Read and write caching was designed for us e w ith HD D s. Caching with SSDs introduces

additional overhead thus interfering with the SSDs perf o rmance.

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 communic atio n channels to the SSDs.