Re: Possible performance issue with sata_sil og Gigabyte i-Ram

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Oddbjørn Kvalsund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently purchased a Gigabyte i-Ram GC Ramdisk after reading some
> quite impressive reviews online. Getting the card up and running
> connected to a ST Lab A-223 Serial ATA PCI Card (sil3114 using sata_sil)
> with kernel 2.6.19.1 was quite easy, thanks guys!
> 
> Access times on this thing are great, but I seem to be hitting some
> strange performance-issues when doing large reads/writes. "hdparm -t
> /dev/sda" gives me 80-82 MB/s on average and bonnie++ (see link to
> complete output below) confirms these results.  My simple stdio
> C-program gives write-speeds of around 70 MB/s.  
> 
> Other people using this device report of read/write speeds constantly
> maxing out their SATA150 or PCI-bus. Is this my sil3114 being the
> bottleneck? Other devices on the PCI-bus? My general system (see link to
> the complete output of lspci and /proc/cpuinfo below)? Or is this some
> glitch in the iRam + sil3114 combination?

FWIW, I have nothing but trouble with the gigabyte i-RAM.  I thought it 
was the coolest device in the world, and bought one as soon as I found one.

However, I am unable to keep it from corrupting data.  I primarily use 
it on sil3114, just like your hardware, but I have the same problems 
with other controllers.

My gut feeling is that the i-RAM has very strict RAM model requirements, 
and needs the latest firmware, but I have not yet tested these hypotheses.

I would love to get it working too...

	Jeff