Does RAID0 Really Increase Disk Performance?
HD Tach 3
Contents
We measured the hard disk transfer rate with HD Tach 3. On the charts below you can see the transfer rate of our Samsung HD080HJ hard disk drive when it was configured alone (“single”) and then when we installed two of them under RAID0. HD Tach 3 provides two results, burst read rate, which is the maximum transfer rate the hard disk drive system can achieve, and the average transfer rate. You can see the results for the various stripe sizes we configured. The results are given in MB/s, so the higher, the better.
The hard disk system burst read transfer rate increased between 49.17% and 57.39% when we used RAID0 configuration instead of a single disk configuration. The performance difference between the highest RAID result (32 KB stripes) and the lowest RAID result (64 KB stripes) was of 5.52%.
The hard disk system average transfer rate increased between 93.76% and 101.36% when we used a RAID0 configuration instead of a single disk configuration – in other words, RAID0 doubled the hard disk drive system average speed! The performance difference between the highest RAID result (32 KB stripes) and the lowest RAID result (128 KB stripes) was of 3.93%.