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Date:      Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:14:40 -0400
From:      Howard Goldstein <hg@queue.to>
To:        Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: [resolved, naively] Re: geom vs ich through ar device - benchmarks?
Message-ID:  <46A7F580.6000005@queue.to>
In-Reply-To: <46A7F2C2.2090009@samsco.org>
References:  <46A4E8FA.6010403@queue.to> <46A7B3FB.7010504@queue.to> <46A7B7AF.6080308@samsco.org> <46A7BF8C.5020909@queue.to> <46A7F2C2.2090009@samsco.org>

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Scott Long wrote:
> Howard Goldstein wrote:
>   
>> Scott Long wrote:
>>     
>>> Howard Goldstein wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Testbed: Pair of WDC3200AAKS 320gb SATA, freshly newfsd 10gb filesystem
>>>> mounted with softupdates, remounted after each test
>>>> P4 @ 3ghz on a P4P800 in 6.2-STABLE, single user mode, ICH5R controller
>>>> detects these SATA-II drives inexplicably as SATA-I
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> ICH5 only support SATA-1.
>>>       
>> Dang. Does anyone yield SATA-II speeds with the a PCI controller?  I'm
>> not sure if 25-30MB/s is even possible with regular PCI
>>
>>     
>
> Even PCI-33 should be able to sustain about 100MB/s, enough to handle a
> single disk drive.  Many controller are PCI-X or PCIe now, which has
> plenty of bandwidth for 4-8 drives.
>
>   
Sorry I dropped a zero as my stupid test showed 76-77MB/s. I think I
should perhaps throw in the towel as the manual for this old P4P800
claims its "32 bit PCI 2.2 support ... 133MB/s maximum"
>>>> Of course after this I used gmirror...
>>>>         
>>> Just so we're clear, the ICH5 doesn't have any firmware and doesn't
>>>
>>> actually do any RAID operations. What is has is hook into the system
>>> BIOS during boot. That hook allows the BIOS to do RAID-like operations
>>> during boot, until the OS takes over control of the devices. After
>>> that, it's up to the OS to do all the RAID work. The 'ar' driver is
>>> still software RAID, just like gmirror. What you've effectively done
>>> merely compare the performance of one software RAID stack to another.
>>> That's certainly an interesting comparison, but maybe not exactly what
>>> you had in mind.
>>>
>>>       
>> It's helpful - thank you.  Do you think I'm correct in assuming the
>> interface is pretty much saturated at this point and if I wanted
>> additional speed I'd need to start thinking bringing in additional or
>> faster interfaces?
>>     
>
> You should be able to sustain at least 70MB/s on a single modern drive
> with SATA-1 or SATA-2.  If you're not getting that then something in the
> driver or the application is getting in the way.  Even with the, um,
> "problems" that SiI controllers are famous for, you should be able to
> sustain a decent data rate on a single drive.
>   
Thank you, Scott




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