Monthly Archives: July 2014

WD RE4 series benchmark.

So I was curious after doing that benchmark test on my SSD’s in RAID 0.

I ran the benchmark on a server that has a 1TB WD RE4 series disk. They claim 128 MB/s sustained from the disk.

My benchmark of the drive confirms their claim.

WD RE4 Benchmark

The drive maxed out at about 127 MB/s write and 138 MB/s on the read. I guess that is a fast drive, but is left in the dust when put up against an SSD and blown away totally against SSD in RAID 0.

Single Drive vs Raid 0

Every computer nerd knows RAID 0 is quick. My most recent computer (now about 1 year old) I put in three SSD drives operating in RAID 0 – I wanted quick.

I had an extra drive come out of another machine so I stuck it in there, but as a stand alone drive where I just put temporary files etc.

I was doing some reading today about different raid levels and performance. If you need redundancy RAID 10 seems to be the fastest option so that is what I will be using in my next batch of servers.

I never bothered to benchmark them before, I just knew that RAID 0 was faster. Is there an actual difference? Lets find out.

Performance of single SSD

The single SSD maxes out with a write speed of 138MB/sec with a read speed of 276MB/sec. That is quite snappy. I’ve seen laptop hard drives that can only do in the 12MB/sec, those laptops are painful to use.

Performance of three SSD in RAID 0

RAID 0 with three SSD disks. A max write speed of 1205MB/sec and a max read speed of 1552MB/sec – incredibly fast!

Interesting how the write speed closes the gap when you have multiple disks. Bottom line, running disks in RAID 0 does make a considerable difference! Even more interesting is how the performance increased by more than three times!

I used the free benchmark software from ATO Tech to do the testing.

RAR & UNRAR on Linux

Seems linux people don’t like RAR very much, it is not easy to install from most package managers it seems. Some used to have it, then removed it because it was not free.

Then some people come up with limited free versions etc. etc. I ended up just getting it direct from the source @ rarlab.

Move to your tmp folder and download from rarlab site.

cd /tmp
wget https://www.rarlab.com/rar/rarlinux-x64-5.8.b1.tar.gz

Extract the downloaded file (extracts to rar folder).

tar -zxvf rarlinux-x64-5.8.b1.tar.gz

Move the files to your /bin folder so you can execute rar and unrar from anywhere on your system.

cp rar/rar rar/unrar /bin

That’s about it. Now you can actually use the full power of rar on your linux box.