From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Terrence Martin Subject: Re: Interesting Performance with Marvell Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:33:39 -0800 Message-ID: <43AA3AB3.404@physics.ucsd.edu> References: <43A9FA5A.7000704@physics.ucsd.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from dsl093-032-179.snd1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([66.93.32.179]:61909 "EHLO partlyharmless.local") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932382AbVLVFdj (ORCPT ); Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:33:39 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Sebastian Kuzminsky Cc: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote: >Terrence Martin 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