Hi, We used 3ware 7500-4 as ide raid controler on a redhat advanced server machine. (kernel 2.4.9-e12, lastest 3ware driver). But we got a pretty bad write speed. Sequential Writes File Blk Num Avg Maximum Lat% Lat% CPU Identifier Size Size Thr Rate (CPU%) Latency Latency >2s >10s Eff ---------------------------- ------ ----- --- ------ ------ --------- ----- ------ -------- -------- ----- 2.4.9-e.12enterprise 1792 4096 1 8.99 6.920% 0.394 29064.03 0.00240 0.00218 130 2.4.9-e.12enterprise 1792 4096 2 10.55 17.61% 0.637 23474.59 0.00480 0.00218 60 2.4.9-e.12enterprise 1792 4096 4 1.94 11.22% 0.156 1861.13 0.00000 0.00000 17 2.4.9-e.12enterprise 1792 4096 8 0.83 7.171% 0.274 995.19 0.00000 0.00000 12 I saw a thread (http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg01762.html) discussing the simillar problem by your guys. The possible reason you pointed out is: 3ware card has its own caching mechanism to accelerate sequential write, but combine with linux's own VM caching and journaling filesystem, the disk physical accesses aren't actually sequential. I have several questions: (1) Does this problem only exists in 3ware ide raid adaptor? We test SCSI too, it is much faster. If it is 3ware's driver problem, scsi raid should have the same problem. (2) Has 3ware fixed this problem yet? They claim they support linux. (3) One solution is to setup 3ware in jbod mode and use linux software-raid. what percentage of CPU used if using software-raid? It might cost too much CPU power without using hardware raid. (4) Other than 3ware, is there any better raid card supported by linux? I appreciate your guys help Donghui Wen - 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