From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Sep 17 02:16:37 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: hardware@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C414616A418; Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:16:37 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jonny@jonny.eng.br) Received: from coe.ufrj.br (roma.coe.ufrj.br [146.164.53.65]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7BB0313C461; Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:16:37 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jonny@jonny.eng.br) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by coe.ufrj.br (Postfix) with ESMTP id CBC32125411; Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:52:08 -0300 (BRT) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at coe.ufrj.br Received: from coe.ufrj.br ([146.164.53.65]) by localhost (roma.coe.ufrj.br [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id zfwmVaCELjWd; Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:52:02 -0300 (BRT) Received: from [201.19.116.51] (unknown [201.19.116.51]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by coe.ufrj.br (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1C73B125409; Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:52:02 -0300 (BRT) Message-ID: <46EDDDD0.2070409@jonny.eng.br> Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2007 22:52:16 -0300 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jo=E3o_Carlos_Mendes_Lu=EDs?= User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Windows/20070728) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: geom@freebsd.org, hardware@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Cc: Subject: SATA mirrror performance X-BeenThere: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: General discussion of FreeBSD hardware List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 02:16:37 -0000 Hi, I've sent this to -performance, but maybe one of these is the right forum. Sorry to crosspost. Also, I am not currently subscribed to these two lists, so please CC me. ... I have just installed two 500G SATA discs from Seagate, model ST3500641AS in an ASUS M2N-E motherboard (nVidia MCP55 chipset). Since this is a home desktop and I need dual boot, I used nVidia's RAID technology to create the array, while still using the previous disks for booting. Well, the suggested device to control these disks, IIRC, is ataraid, so I went for it. But its performance was incredibly slow. I had less than half a megabyte per second in a raw transfer (dd). Formating 100G UFS2 partitions take more than a minute. And all this was drivers fault, as far as I could notice from "systat -v" output. The array was operating near 100% capacity. While running newfs, and this I remember for sure, the array was performing at 4 (four!) transfers per second, and near 100% load. I also noticed that ataraid does not integrate with GEOM. Shouldn't it be by now? Just to be sure it was no defect in disks, they worked perfectly in Windows XP. So my solution was to build a whole disk RAID1 device using gmirror, but now I have two independent and non-interoperational RAID technologies. Indeed, I am very luck that nVidia's RAID does not use the same sector as gmirror for metadata, or if they use, that it does not clash. After using gmirror, now I have the RAID in its full performance, getting over 60Mbytes per second at raw reads, very near the 70MBps from the specs. Could only be better if we already had NCQ working. Now the question: Is this expected? Is ataraid somehow deprecated? If that matters, this has been done on the last week's RELENG_6 source build. The CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+, with 3G RAM. Jonny -- João Carlos Mendes Luís - Networking Engineer - jonny@jonny.eng.br