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Synthetic benchmarks: EXT3 creation time
Synthetic benchmarks are very good for examine low level and theoretical array performances. The first test measure the time required to create an EXT3 filesystem on the disks array. Please note that, as the various RAID configurations end up in creating different sized volumes, I normalized the creation time by expressing it in MB/s.
This first test show us a strong advantage for RAID 0, but remember that this RAID level is almost never used in servers because it is too prone to data loss. Here we also see that RAID 10 outperform RAID 5 by about 20%.