From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Jul 26 14:22:31 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from gateway.cybernet.com (gateway.cybernet.com [192.245.33.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 882E614CE2; Mon, 26 Jul 1999 14:22:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mtaylor@cybernet.com) Received: from spiffy.cybernet.com (spiffy.cybernet.com [192.245.33.55]) by gateway.cybernet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA16381; Mon, 26 Jul 1999 17:21:34 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from mtaylor@cybernet.com) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.3 [p0] on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 17:25:23 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: mtaylor@cybernet.com Organization: Cybernet Systems From: "Mark J. Taylor" To: Phillip Salzman Subject: RE: RAID controllers Cc: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org The SmartRaid IV is supported under FreeBSD, and the V is not. We've tried them both under both FreeBSD 2.2.8 and 3.2. (I think that DPT provides a RPM for their SmartRaid V card for Linux.) There is an "open issue" with the IV: put in the Cache/RAID5 controller module (necessary to do RAID), and your performance DROPS TO NEARLY 220 kbytes/sec read performance. Ick. We tried the SmartRaid IV on several different machines, with different SCSI hard drives, same result: when you put in the Cache/RAID5 module, the performance really drops. From what I've gathered, the problem may be in the IRQ generation: the controller generates about 1 IRQ per second during read operations ('systat -vm 1'), which means that the driver is either in poll mode, or the hardware is 'broken'. We've been in contact with DPT (last week, as a matter of fact) regarding this. They know about it, and don't have a work- around. -Mark Taylor NetMAX Developer mtaylor@cybernet.com FreeBSD 3.2 based NetMAX is now available! Linux 2.0.37/RedHat 5.2 based NetMAX is now available! http://www.netmax.com/ On 26-Jul-99 Phillip Salzman wrote: > > Hello, > > I'm planning on deploying a massive squid cache in combination with > the SkyCache satellite downlink. For this we decided that a RAID-5 > system would be almost completely necessary. > > After looking at the DPT SmartRAID IV controller, we were going to > purchase the PM3334UDW (low voltage differential). Oddly enough, DPT > is no longer offering this controller. They seem to still have the > regular PM3334UW, and the newer SmartRAID V. > > Does anyone know of a place that may still have the PM3334UDW in stock, > or know the current status of the drivers for the SmartRAID V? I'd > really really hate to be forced to install the alternative on the squid > cache, Redtie, because of support reasons. > > Thanks in advance! > > --- > Phillip Salzman > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message