From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Feb 9 16:29:52 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 467361065672 for ; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:29:52 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dan@langille.org) Received: from nyi.unixathome.org (nyi.unixathome.org [64.147.113.42]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1578D8FC13 for ; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:29:51 +0000 (UTC) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nyi.unixathome.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 48FA8508B4; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:29:51 +0000 (GMT) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at unixathome.org Received: from nyi.unixathome.org ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (nyi.unixathome.org [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with ESMTP id W-8WFhEMvU96; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:29:50 +0000 (GMT) Received: from nyi.unixathome.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nyi.unixathome.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 936CA508B0; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 16:29:49 +0000 (GMT) Received: from 68.64.144.211 (SquirrelMail authenticated user dan) by nyi.unixathome.org with HTTP; Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:29:50 -0500 Message-ID: <7118399d109e0c1849ae17ffa8ee9c66.squirrel@nyi.unixathome.org> In-Reply-To: <2e027be01002090716y77213c45pb937e22151a2c238@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B6F9A8D.4050907@langille.org> <2e027be01002090451w2b4506a0ofb5ab55c647540a@mail.gmail.com> <2e027be01002090609y28be404dl1bb610d047b15f9b@mail.gmail.com> <2e027be01002090716y77213c45pb937e22151a2c238@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 11:29:50 -0500 From: "Dan Langille" To: "Tom Evans" User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.20-RC2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Importance: Normal Cc: Charles Sprickman , FreeBSD Stable , Dan Langille Subject: Re: hardware for home use large storage X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:29:52 -0000 On Tue, February 9, 2010 10:16 am, Tom Evans wrote: > On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:01 PM, Dan Langille wrote: >> >> On Tue, February 9, 2010 9:09 am, Tom Evans wrote: >>> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Dan Langille wrote: >>> One thing to point out about using a PM like this: you won't get >>> fantastic bandwidth out of it. For my needs (home storage server), >>> this really doesn't matter, I just want oodles of online storage, with >>> redundancy and reliability. >> >> >> A PM?  What's that? >> >> Yes, my priority is reliable storage.  Speed is secondary. >> >> What bandwidth are you getting? >> > > PM = Port Multiplier > > I'm getting disk speed, as I only have one device behind the PM > currently (just making sure it works properly :). The limits are that > the link from siis to the PM is SATA (3Gb/s, 375MB/s), and the siis > sits on a PCIe 1x bus (2Gb/s, 250 MB/s), so the bandwidth from that is > shared amongst the up-to 5 disks behind the PM. > > Writing from /dev/zero to the pool, I get around 120MB/s. Reading from > the pool, and writing to /dev/null, I get around 170 MB/s. > That leads me to conclude that a number of SATA cards is better than a port multiplier. But the impression I'm getting is that few of these work well with FreeBSD. Which is odd... I thought these cards would merely present the HDD to the hardware and no diver was required. As opposed to RAID cards for which OS-specific drivers are required. -- Dan Langille -- http://langille.org/