Hi Pretty new to software raid, I have the following setup in a file server: /dev/md0: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Wed Oct 10 11:05:46 2007 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 976767872 (931.52 GiB 1000.21 GB) Used Dev Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB) Raid Devices : 3 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Thu Oct 18 15:02:16 2007 State : active Active Devices : 3 Working Devices : 3 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K UUID : 9dcbd480:c5ca0550:ca45cdab:f7c9f29d Events : 0.9 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 33 0 active sync /dev/sdc1 1 8 49 1 active sync /dev/sdd1 2 8 65 2 active sync /dev/sde1 3 x 500GB WD RE2 hard drives AMD Athlon XP 2400 (2.0Ghz), 1GB RAM /dev/sd[ab] are connected to Sil 3112 controller on PCI bus /dev/sd[cde] are connected to Sil 3114 controller on PCI bus Transferring large media files from /dev/sdb to /dev/md0 I see the following with iostat: avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 1.01 0.00 55.56 40.40 0.00 3.03 Device: tps MB_read/s MB_wrtn/s MB_read MB_wrtn sda 0.00 0.00 0.00 0 0 sdb 261.62 31.09 0.00 30 0 sdc 148.48 0.15 16.40 0 16 sdd 102.02 0.41 16.14 0 15 sde 113.13 0.29 16.18 0 16 md0 8263.64 0.00 32.28 0 31 which is pretty much what I see with hdparm etc. 32MB/s seems pretty slow for drives that can easily do 50MB/s each. Read performance is better around 85MB/s (although I expected somewhat higher). So it doesn't seem that PCI bus is limiting factor here (127MB/s theoretical throughput.. 100MB/s real world?) quite yet... I see a lot of time being spent in the kernel.. and a significant iowait time. The CPU is pretty old but where exactly is the bottleneck? Any thoughts, insights or recommendations welcome! Cheers Peter -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/slow-raid5-performance-tf4650085.html#a13284909 Sent from the linux-raid mailing list archive at Nabble.com. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html