On Tue, 3 Aug 2021 14:59:45 +0000 "Finlayson, James M CIV (USA)" <james.m.finlayson4.civ@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > My SA just gave me the server with the 5.14 RC4 kernel built. I have a two pass preconditioning run going right now to get us maximum results. I expect to be able to run the tests hopefully by COB Wednesday. Preconditioning will take 8 hours unfortunately (15.36TB drives), I have to make BIOS changes for apples to apples "hero runs" and then get the mdraid's created. In your opinion, if I bypass the initial formatting with mdadm --assume-clean, will that make a difference in the results? I usually let the format run, but I want to get you results as soon as possible. You're running Reads workload so it doesn't make sense to read stuff without formatting first. IMO, you better wait for the formatting to complete rather than try to skip/reduce it. Also, note that in my tests I had to setup XFS over the raid in order to avoid queueing issues. Feel free to ping me if you want the setup script or the vdbench file(s) that I used. Cheers, Gal