Mac mini Server RAID 0 vs. RAID 1 vs. other Macs

On December 11, 2009, in Mac, by Kevin

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mac-fusion has a new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. It ships with (2) 500GB hard drives but it’s not configured as any kind of RAID. We wanted to know how the redundancy and reduced capacity of a RAID 1 compared to the speed and size benefits of running a RAID 0. We also wanted to find the baseline speed of a non RAID setup. So we pitted the mini against itself and several other Macs for good measure.

Methodology

We used Quickbench 4.0.4. It says it’s Leopard compatible but there’s no mention of Snow Leopard. That would really be a drag if all this data was not valid. But unfortunately the developer’s support forums have been offline all week so we’ll go with it for now. We ran the Standard test using transfer sizes ranging from 4KB to 1MB and taking the average. We did 5 passes to try and even out any big anomalies. All machines were tested after being rebooted, and, except for the Xserve with SSD, all servers were running a minimum set of services. We threw the Xserve SSD in just to see if the MacBook Air SSD performance was hobbled at all. Results are in MB per second.

Sequential Read

SequentialRead2

Sequential Write

SequentialWrite2

Random Read

RandomRead2

Random Write

RandomWrite2

Thoughts

It’s no surprise that you get what you pay for and the Xserve with RAID 5 Donkey Kongs the others in all but Random Read, although not by a huge margin. But if you’re supporting a workgroup of more than a handful of people and providing a broad range of services, it’s the way to go. The MacBook Air w/ the SSD drive puts up some pretty solid numbers in the Random Read area. That’s the nature of SSD. And that’s what makes it feel pretty sporty compared to a regular HD. But it’s still slower than a production Xserve box with an SSD. I don’t know if that’s the drive or the bus or something else but would love some comments on that.  Even though the old mini didn’t come anywhere near saturating it’s limited 1.5Gbps SATA bus, I don’t think it helped anything. That thing is S L O W. The Mac min Server however is much faster even with a single drive. But, to address what we set out to find, if you’ve got a good backup plan in place, the size and speed benefits of a RAID 0 seem to be justified offering nearly 2x the performance in both sequential tests, a small boost in Random Read and nearly a 50% gain in Random Write.

Specs

Mac mini – Mac mini (Late 2006) 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 60GB, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

Mac mini Server – Mac mini (Mac OS X Server, Late 2009) 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 2x500GB, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

MacBook Air SSD – MacBook Air (Mid 2009) 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Mac OS X 10.6.2

MacBook Pro – MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200RPM, Mac OS X 10.6.2

Mac Pro – Mac Pro Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors, 8GB RAM, 1TB Hitachi Deskstar, Mac OS X 10.5.8

Xserve SSD – Xserve (Early 2009) Two 2.66GHz Quad-Core  Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors, 12GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2

Xserve RAID 5 – Xserve (Early 2009) One 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon ”Nehalem” processor, 6GB RAM, 3x1TB Apple Drive Modules, Xserve RAID Card, Mac OS X Server 10.6.2


 
  • Sean Root

    Nice review & benchmarks. Thanks for putting this together!

  • Sean Root

    Any chance to get a test with the Mac mini server and an external FW800 7200rpm drive on there?

  • Alex

    Cool test… I’m looking at getting a Mac Mini (not the server) 2.53 GHz and upgrade it to two 7200 RPM SATA drives in RAID 0. I know Disk Utility can do this in software, but can I install Snow Leopard on this striped volume and use it as the startup disk? It seems RAID 1 and concatenated setups work in this fashion, but I don’t know about RAID 0…

  • David

    Hi–
    Do you recall what the RAID Block Size was for the Mac Mini Server RAID 0?
    The default seems to be 32K. Is that what you used, or would recommend for best performance (general use)?
    I’m configuring one now and need to choose between 16K, 32K, 64K and 128K. I’ve read that since we’re not using it (primarily) for video, 32K or 64K are recommended. What did you do, and what would you recommend?
    Thanks!

  • http://www.mac-fusion.com Kevin

    One problem is that you’d need a drive carrier for a second drive since regular Mac Minis come w/ an optical drive where the second drive sits on the Mini Server. Get past that hurdle and I can’t foresee any problems.

  • http://www.mac-fusion.com Kevin

    I went with the default block size of 32K. The deal w/ block size is that if you have files smaller than your block size you take up an unnecessary amount of space. On the other hand if you’re working with large files there’s a potential speed increase by using the larger blocks. Hope that helps.