Re: Interesting Performance with Marvell

[Terrence Martin <tmartin@physics.ucsd.edu>]

Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote:

>Terrence Martin <tmartin@physics.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>  
>
>>Sebastian what are the mfg of the Marvell controller you are using?
>>    
>>
>
>Sonnet.  It's their "Tempo-X 8 SATA" card.  PCI-X, 8 external SATA
>ports and no internal ports.  I'll post performance numbers soon or
>after Newtonmas.
>
>Who made you 8-port card?
>
>
>  
>
Supermicro is the manufacturer of the board. As far as I can tell it is 
just a PCI-X SATA controller with the Marvell chipset driving 8 
interfaces. I am evaluating various SATA controllers, raid and non-raid 
to see if any actually can provide decent performance. So far 3ware 
9550SX is ok, the Areca 1110 is not that impressive using their driver 
at least. The Marvell 8 port addin card is comparable to the onboard 
Marvell 4 port for reads delivering 190MB/s but it is much slower on 
writes for some reason.

I know that drivers can make a significant difference. With 3ware 9500 
4LP cards the 3ware driver provides about twice the performance of the 
one that comes with redhats RHEL4.2 kernels. I have not tried kernel.org 
kernels on that card. 9550SX is a 3ware provided driver.

I just see a lot of variance between cards and cost seldom seems to 
indicate performance. The supermicro card is about $125US so is good 
value if I can figure out why the poor write performance compared to the 
onboard. The onboard I am happy with so far. My opterons have the 
marvell onboard as well, 4 port. I will be checking those next.

Terrence