It can of course also be used by anyone else, but this test is not doing any random read/writes.
In general, it would be good to run this test (or any other test) under 3 different scenarios when using raid systems:
- normal working raid system
- degraded raid system
- rebuild of raid system
The script needs 2 areas:
- one where you have files that are read during the read tests, and
- one where you want write files to. This write area should have no compression since the writes come from /dev/zero.
By default it is doing reads over all specified files, writes to large files, and writes to small files.
For the reads, first it is doing a sequential read for all files, and in a second pass it reads files in parallel for the same set of files.
For the writes, it is doing a sequential write first and in a second pass it is writing in parallel do different files. That is the same for the writing of large files and of small files.
After each read/write pass there is a cache flush and also each single write issues a file sync after each file is written to make sure that the time is measured to really write a file to disk.
The script needs 3 parameters:
- location of a text files that contains the file name including absolute path for all files that you want to include in the read tests
- a name used as description for your test, it can be used to distinguish between different tests (e.g. ZFS-raid2-12 disks or ZFS-raidz3-12disks)
- absolute path to an area where the write test can write it files too; this area should have no compression enabled
The parameters inside the script, like number of parallel read/writes and file sizes, can easily be configured. By default about 5TB space are needed for the write tests.
The script itself can be downloaded here.
