Descobri hoje o fio e resolvi fazer alguns testes.

Vai aqui um breve comparativo just-for-fun de um random-read:

Latitude E6400 (meu laptop)

• kernel 2.6.35 (Mint Julia)
• Filesystem EXT4

• Disco:

description: ATA Disk
       product: ST9250421ASG
       vendor: Seagate

read : io=131072KB, bw=589452B/s, iops=143, runt=227699msec

Dell Power Edge T110

• Kernel 2.6.38 (Ubuntu Natty)
• Filesystem Reiserfs
• Disco:

description: ATA Disk
       product: WDC WD2502ABYS-1
       vendor: Western Digital

read : io=131072KB, bw=700945B/s, iops=171, runt=191481msec

• RaidZ (fuse ZFS) composto dos seguintes discos:

*-disk:1
       description: ATA Disk
       product: ST31000524AS
       vendor: Seagate

*-disk:2
       description: ATA Disk
       product: Hitachi HDS72101
       vendor: Hitachi

*-disk:3
       description: ATA Disk
       product: ST31000528AS
       vendor: Seagate

read : io=262144KB, bw=1066KB/s, iops=266, runt=246014msec

Dell Power Edge 2850

• Kernel 2.6.18-164 (CentOS 5.4)
• Filesystem EXT3/LVM
• Disco:

*-disk ->> Isso é um RAID5 composto de 4 discos SAS 15K
       description: SCSI Disk
       product: LD 0 RAID5  559G
       vendor: MegaRAID

[random-read]
rw=randread
size=256m
directory=/partição/fio/data