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Date:      Thu, 9 Dec 2004 12:50:55 -0600 (CST)
From:      "Jon Noack" <noackjr@alumni.rice.edu>
To:        "Bill Anderson" <anderson@wks.uts.ohio-state.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-performance@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 2120S poor performance
Message-ID:  <17418.69.53.57.66.1102618255.squirrel@69.53.57.66>
In-Reply-To:  <Pine.GSO.4.33.0412081120520.4974-100000@lennier.uts.ohio-state.edu>
References:   <Pine.GSO.4.33.0412081120520.4974-100000@lennier.uts.ohio-state.edu>

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Bill Anderson wrote:
> I've got a 3x72g RAID5 array with U320 disks on an Adaptec 2120S
> controller under Freebsd 4.10.  I'm getting about 25MB/s for sequential
> reads/writes (e.g.  dd if=/dev/aacd0s1b of=/dev/null bs=32k).  I've
> turned on write caching for the container (container set cache
> /write_cache_enable) and turned off the read caching, per previous posts
> to this list.  I'm going to try setting hw.aac.iosize_max to 96k tonight
> to see if that helps.  I'm currently using an IDE disk that gets about
> 45MB/s, so I can hardly consider it an "upgrade" to switch to a 25MB/s
> U320 SCSI system.  :/
>
> I've also read that the 2120S is slow because of its design.  I'm trying
> to figure out whether the performance can be increased significantly (I
> saw a posting of a linux user getting 37.5MB/s, which although still slow
> might be acceptable), or if I'm better off getting a new card.  I'm
> thinking the latter is the case based on previous postings, but since it
> will probably be quite expensive to replace it, I wanted to get some more
> data.
>
> What performance should I be expecting from a decent U320 RAID5
> controller?
>
> Has anyone gotten a 2120S to perform above 30Mb/s in FreeBSD?
>
> What's the cheapest controller that still gives reasonable performance?
> (If you could give a couple different ones, with their associated
> performance (under FreeBSD), or tell me where to find such information,
> that would be great)

The asr driver is in need of a lot of attention.  Still, testing random
read/write is much better than testing sequential i/o as most real-world
workloads aren't sequential in nature.  The raidtest utility (now in
ports) does an excellent job with random read/write testing.

There are many quality, (relatively) cheap controllers out there, but if
you're looking to stick with Adaptec get a 2130S.  The 2130S uses the aac
driver, which is quite well tuned and maintained by Scott Long.

Jon



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