On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Hermann Himmelbauer wrote: > Well - I have an old Dual P-II-266 System with an onboard SCSI-Controller with > 3 Ultra SCSI-disks connected, building a RAID5. I did a simple Test with > "hdparm -tT" to provide you with numbers: > > /dev/sdb: > Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.46 seconds = 87.67 MB/sec > Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 5.07 seconds = 12.62 MB/sec It's possibly the "old Dual P-II-266" that may be slowing things down here. On one of my systems: (Dual Athlon 2.4 with 2 Promise PCI IDE cards and 4 drives): >From /proc/mdstat md4 : active raid5 hdk6[3] hdi6[1] hdg6[2] hde6[0] 176055936 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU] Single drive: /dev/hdg6: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.48 seconds =266.67 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.49 seconds = 42.95 MB/sec The array: /dev/md4: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.50 seconds =256.00 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 0.97 seconds = 65.98 MB/sec On another server (Dual PIII/Xeon 700MHz with SCSI drives) md4 : active raid5 sdd6[3] sdc6[1] sdb6[2] sda6[0] 23663424 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU] Single drive: /dev/sdc6: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.59 seconds =216.95 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.39 seconds = 18.88 MB/sec The array: /dev/md4: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.57 seconds =224.56 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 0.75 seconds = 85.33 MB/sec The array in this case is 4 disks, connected 2 disks to an on-board dual Adaptec controller (It's a Dell 6xxx box) It also has 2 PCI adaptec 7xxx cards connected to an external box with 8 drives: md6 : active raid5 sdl2[7] sdh2[6] sdk2[5] sdg2[4] sdj2[3] sdf2[2] sdi2[1] sde2[0] 62918016 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [8/8] [UUUUUUUU] Single drive: /dev/sdk2: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.58 seconds =220.69 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.00 seconds = 16.00 MB/sec The array: /dev/md6: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.57 seconds =224.56 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.03 seconds = 62.14 MB/sec fast RAID array! So my advice is that if you want speed, be prepared to spend the £££ to get that speed (and I don't consider these servers particularly fast, but they are fast enough for my application which is NFS & Samba serving a small company of engineers (software/hardware) via a single 100MB/sec Ethernet interface). Gordon - 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