> Yes, don't use the 3Ware BIOS RAID. > Run it in JBOD mode, and use Linux RAID. > Neil's md tools make this very nice, and if you go to the 3Ware site and > look in the downloads they have CLI tools to support hotswap and other > useful things. > On a set of 16 Maxtor 160GB disk, and a pair of 3Ware 8 port cards we > regularly get RAID5 writes (using a 4GB block/file size measured by > bonnie++) of over 75MB/sec and reads over 160MB/sec. > > I do think you should be seeing better results with the card and it's > native BIOS RAID, but I still think that software Linux RAID is a lot > faster and more flexible. I'm with Maurice on this one. I changed over from using 3wares BIOS RAID to using Linux software RAID and my write speeds went up to from 15mb/sec (pathetic) to almost 120mb/sec which almost matches my read speeds (using Bonnie++). This was using 4x40GB Maxtor drives in a RAID 5 configuration. One downside to using the drives in JBOD mode is with 3wares current drivers if you use their software to remove the drive and then put it back in, it then recognizes it as a CBOD drive of which then is unrecognizable by the software RAID. 3ware had a few suggestions that simply were not working so I placed the drive in a separate machine and ran fdisk to remove all partitions. Then upon putting it back in with a reboot rather than using the software it was again seen as a JBOD drive. This means no hot swapping but a reboot would be required. The good news is 3ware has told me they are attempting to make a workaround in their drivers so you can add and remove a JBOD drive without a shutdown. Jay > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
