My thanks to those who responded. I have the 3ware 8506-4LP installed and
running with a pair of Maxtor Maxline III drives. I'm out looking for the
SmartMonTools suite, per the advice given.
Bonnie++ gives me results like 22034 k/s seq out, char mode, 32660 block
mode, 13120 rewrite. Yikes! 91 to 94% cpu utilization for character mode
output! I suppose that's pretty inefficient though. More like 35-38% for
block, 27% for rewrites.
Tweaking the background task control one step left or right of center
towards "Faster Task" or "Faster IO" seems to make a small but measurable
difference, but oddly, sequential reads using Bonnie++ were slightly faster
when tweaked towards "Faster Task."
I found out something else too, something which I supposed should have been
obvious. I started out with ext3 on this array. I wiped it and changed it
to xfs, which benchmarks faster, at least as far as Bonnie++ can tell. I
guess ext3 is a journaling fs, is it not?
Is there some particular filesystem that's any better than any other for
hardware mirrored arrays?
-Tom
At 08:38 AM 1/31/2006 +0100, Peter Daum wrote:
tw_clin is the (binary only) command line tool for maintaining 3ware
controllers. All you can do with the web frontend can be done this
way, too.
Performance of the 3ware 8506 is pretty reasonable (I got a data rate
of ~ 80 MB/s with RAID 10 , 55-60 with RAID 1 ) and about the same
for reading and writing.
Unfortunately, after my experiences (see above), i have some serious
concerns regarding data integrity, though ...
Regards,
Peter Daum
Tom Peters wrote:
Hi, brand new newbie (is that redundant?) here, who soon to be the proud
owner of a 3ware 8506-4 RAID card, on its way in the mail. I'm running an
old P3 on SuSE 9.2 and would like to know what to read to get up to speed
on setting this card up and maintaining it once I do. I'm pretty new to
linux and get a lot of advice that is pitched just slightly above my
level of understanding, so please go slow.
I'm currently using a Compaq SmartArray 3200 with 8 drives and I've about
given up getting any kind of reasonable performance out of it. That, plus
the outrageous cost of SCSI drives, is the reason for the switch to SATA.
I can borrow a pair of 300 GB drives for a while to prove the concept
(the 3ware card wasn't that pricey) and if I can get it to work
reasonably well, buy some drives. I think there's some voodoo in the BIOS
of a real Compaq server that makes it work properly; for me it's a dog
and writes unbelievably slow.
I've been reading this group for a few weeks and hear some hints and
intimations about things I should probably learn about. For example,
someone just mentioned tw_cli maint verify, is that a 3ware thing or a
ext3 thing? And the fact that there is a 3ware knowledgebase (e.g.
http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=13247 should help.
So what else do I need to know?
-T
[Philosophy] There is nothing that somebody, somewhere, will not
consider immoral. --Jan.Six@xxxxxx
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