Btw, one of our customers recently aquired new gear with HP SmartArray Gen8 controllers. Now they are something to get excited about! This is the kind of write performance I would expect from an expensive server product. Check this out (this is again my artificial benchmark as well as random write of 4K blocks): SmartArray P400, 6 300G disks (10k, SAS) RAID 6, 256M BBWC: ag4 Read 0b Written 161.56Mb Total transferred 161.56Mb (5.3853Mb/sec) 1378.63 Requests/sec executed random write Read 0b Written 97.578Mb Total transferred 97.578Mb (3.2526Mb/sec) 832.66 Requests/sec executed SmartArray Gen8, 8 300G disks (15k, SAS) RAID 5, 2GB FBWC: ag4 Read 0b Written 2.4575Gb Total transferred 2.4575Gb (83.883Mb/sec) 21474.03 Requests/sec executed random write Read 0b Written 343.86Mb Total transferred 343.86Mb (11.462Mb/sec) 2934.24 Requests/sec executed So yeah, the disks are a bit faster. But what does that matter when there is such a huge difference otherwise? Unfortunately, while composing this text, I noticed that the new one is configured as RAID 5, and I cannot change it because of HP's licensing policy. That makes it not a meaningful comparison, although extrapolation from previous SmartArray controllers would suggest that the RAID5 and RAID6 performance is comparable. My subjective impression is still a very good one! _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
