Venus T5 : Benchmarks (ZFS versus Hardware RAID)

After trying out ZFS on a handful of fitful USB keys I pulled out the AMS Venus T5 a 5 drive SATA RAID enclosure with an eSATA port for plugging into the computer. The Venus T5 was outfitted with 5 x 7200RPM 1TB Seagate Drives for the test. I was curious as to what the difference would be

RAID 0 setting has them all striped together. The Single Drive results are an average from all 5 drives. To keep in with the previous post I still used date +%s for the timings instead of using the more accurate time command.

Standard Test (5 cycles):

Extended Test (5 cycles):

As seen in the ZFS test on the USB keys it’s quite obvious that QuickBench 4.0 is useless in benchmarking a ZFS formatted drive in comparison to other formatted drives. ZFS isn’t supported so it isn’t surprising.

As a continuation of a more consistent test we then copied a 903MB file (Xcode 2.5) and a folder of of 1500 0 byte files numerically named.

date +%s; cp ~/Desktop/SpeedTest/xcode.dmg DESTINATION; date +%s;
cp ~/Desktop/SpeedTest/*.txt DESTINATION; date +%s

With much better hardware the actual throughput information is a lot more interesting.