On 8/16/07, Luke Lonergan <llonergan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Michael, > > There is a problem with some Dell "perc 5" RAID cards, specifically we've > had this problem with the 2950 as of 6 months ago – they do not support > RAID10. They have a setting that sounds like RAID10, but it actually > implements spanning of mirrors. This means that you will not get more than > one disk worth of performance whether you are performing random seeks > (within a one disk sized area) or sequential transfers. > > I recommend you read the section in the Dell configuration guide very > carefully and look for supplemental sources of technical information about > it. We found the issue clearly explained in a Dell technical memo that I > don't have in front of me – we were shocked to find this out. interesting. this may also be true of the other 'rebrands' of the lsi logic chipset. for example, the ibm 8480/exp3000 sets up the same way, namely you do the 'spanadd' function of the firmware which layers the raids. fwiw, I will be testing perc 5 raid 10, 01, 00, and 05 in a dual controller controller configuration as well as dual controller configuration over the md1000 (which is active/active) in a few days. This should give very good support to your claim if the arrays spanned in software singnificantly outperform a single controller. merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org