Performance in Intel IOMeter Workstation Pattern

The Workstation pattern imitates intensive work of a user in various applications in the NTFS5 file system. The table for the WriteBack mode:

The RAID0 arrays show good scalability in speed in relation to the number of the drives per array. The RAID1 is faster than the single drive and even than the two-disk RAID1 (under small workloads), while the RAID10 outperforms the RAID0 of three disks. The RAID5 arrays are poor, but that’s reasonable since this pattern abounds in write requests, which hit severely on the performance of the RAID5.

We calculate the performance rating for the Workstation pattern by the following formula:

Performance Rating = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32.

The PRs for all the arrays are listed below:

The RAID5 arrays fall behind even the single drive in performance. The RAID0 arrays lined up in “size order” (according to the number of disks in them), while the RAID10 was just a little faster than the RAID0 of three disks. The RAID1 has a higher PR than the RAID0 of two disks. That’s because we assume that short queues are more likely to occur in a workstation, and short queues have higher weights in the total result.

Let’s see how lazy write affects the operation of the four-disk arrays in this pattern:

There are write requests in the pattern and the caching mode affects the performance greatly. Switching to the WriteThrough mode, the arrays perform slower by 28-38% (depending on the array type).