Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:11:56 +1000 From: Danny Carroll <fbsd@dannysplace.net> To: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: new server motherboard with SATA II Message-ID: <4864769C.4050002@dannysplace.net> In-Reply-To: <20080627040545.GA21856@eos.sc1.parodius.com> References: <486450DB.4000907@dannysplace.net> <20080627040545.GA21856@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
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Jeremy, thanks for your response. Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > SATA150 and SATA300 both work just fine on FreeBSD, but its dependent > upon what chipset you go with. I would strongly recommend you go with a > board/system that uses Intel's ICH7, 8, or 9 southbridge. I have > extensive experience using these in production environments, and they > are very reliable, plus fast. FreeBSD works quite well with them. I do have a board with an ICH10 chipset but the SATA drives are detected as UDMA-33. I guess the ICH* chipsets would not support AMD64, being an intel chip. > Second, I wouldn't bother considering using Intel MatrixRAID (which all > of the above chipsets support) for any sort of failover for your root/OS > disk, in case you're tempted to try it. FreeBSD has bugs pertaining to > such support (see below Wiki URL for some examples). Yeah, I'm not so keen of the modern trend to have on-board raid. I'd rather keep it simple and let FreeBSD handle it. Root disk will not be raid at all. > Third, I cannot recommend nVidia chipsets, because there have been > numerous reports recently and in the past where the SATA disks are being > detected as UDMA33. I believe there are some ATI/AMD chipsets which are > doing the same. There is a rumour that the operational speed of the > disks is still SATA150/300, and just that FreeBSD is labelling the > negotiated speed wrong, but my recommendation is not to risk it. Hmmm, some people say nforce4 chipsets are cool, some not... It's hard to know which way to go. > Fourth, because you'll likely have multiple disks in a ZFS zpool, you > should probably be aware of the problem that haunts some users from time > to time (re: DMA errors). I've seen it on old ATA hardware. > http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting > >> I'd be willing to go with intel arch although from a ZFS perspective it >> sounds like AMD64 is better. > > There was a recent discussion on developers@ (which is private) about > some topics, which eventually lead into a discussion about ZFS, tuning, > and a 2GB kmem limit in FreeBSD (which affects amd64 too). I can't copy > the conversation/thread because developers@ has a strict "do not > disclose" policy. I thought that the 2gb limit was less of a problem for AMD64 because of the addressing used. > Just be aware you ***will*** need to tune ZFS on FreeBSD to make it > as reliable as possible. We'll like I said, I'd be willing to jump on a list and provide info etc about my setup. I plan to have it running on a test bench with lots of IO for a week or so before I start using it. Even then the data will not be critical so if it breaks then I can rebuild without hassle. System disk will be UFS2 to keep it simple... I've got it running on desktop hardware (ASUS P5Q board with ICH5) while I wait for a decision on a permanent Motherboard. With this setup I see about 60mb write speeds on ZFS across 5 disks. I've done the basic tuning suggested in the Wiki. One thing I notice is that the CPU is used for 30% on Interrupts. It was firewire first, so I disabled it in the BIOS, then it went to UHCI so I disabled all USB ports. Now it is on the ATA controller. All of this was on the same interrupt (19). I'm thinking of getting a couple of Promise SATA-300 TX4 IO cards (non-raid). Perhaps that will offload the CPU. -D
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