The goal of this study is to determine the best configuration parameters for a 5-spindle software RAID using Linux as an NFS file server for Big Data analysis and (mostly write) backup storage.
Large sequential read and write access of files ranging from about 512mb to 4gb is particularly interesting.
Those with more spindles, more users, or more complex I/O patterns should not expect these results to apply to or scale to their environment.
Experimental details are provided below. Here is a summary of the recommendations.