Re: SuSE 9.2 and 3ware 8506 card

[Tom Peters <tpeters@mixcom.com>]

My thanks to those who responded. I have the 3ware 8506-4LP installed and 
running with a pair of Maxtor Maxline III drives. I'm out looking for the 
SmartMonTools suite, per the advice given.

Bonnie++ gives me results like  22034 k/s seq out, char mode, 32660 block 
mode, 13120 rewrite. Yikes! 91 to 94% cpu utilization for character mode 
output! I suppose that's pretty inefficient though. More like 35-38% for 
block, 27% for rewrites.

Tweaking the background task control one step left or right of center 
towards "Faster Task" or "Faster IO" seems to make a small but measurable 
difference, but oddly, sequential reads using Bonnie++ were slightly faster 
when tweaked towards "Faster Task."

I found out something else too, something which I supposed should have been 
obvious. I started out with ext3 on this array. I wiped it and changed it 
to xfs, which benchmarks faster, at least as far as Bonnie++ can tell. I 
guess ext3 is a journaling fs, is it not?

Is there some particular filesystem that's any better than any other for 
hardware mirrored arrays?

-Tom


At 08:38 AM 1/31/2006 +0100, Peter Daum wrote:
>tw_clin is the (binary only) command line tool for maintaining 3ware
>controllers. All you can do with the web frontend can be done this
>way, too.
>
>Performance of the 3ware 8506 is pretty reasonable (I got a data rate
>of ~ 80 MB/s with RAID 10 , 55-60 with RAID 1 ) and about the same
>for reading and writing.
>
>Unfortunately, after my experiences (see above), i have some serious
>concerns regarding data integrity, though ...
>
>Regards,
>                   Peter Daum
>
>
>Tom Peters wrote:
>>Hi, brand new newbie (is that redundant?) here, who soon to be the proud 
>>owner of a 3ware 8506-4 RAID card, on its way in the mail. I'm running an 
>>old P3 on SuSE 9.2 and would like to know what to read to get up to speed 
>>on setting this card up and maintaining it once I do. I'm pretty new to 
>>linux and get a lot of advice that is pitched just slightly above my 
>>level of understanding, so please go slow.
>>I'm currently using a Compaq SmartArray 3200 with 8 drives and I've about 
>>given up getting any kind of reasonable performance out of it. That, plus 
>>the outrageous cost of SCSI drives, is the reason for the switch to SATA. 
>>I can borrow a pair of 300 GB drives for a while to prove the concept 
>>(the 3ware card wasn't that pricey) and if I can get it to work 
>>reasonably well, buy some drives. I think there's some voodoo in the BIOS 
>>of a real Compaq server that makes it work properly; for me it's a dog 
>>and writes unbelievably slow.
>>I've been reading this group for a few weeks and hear some hints and 
>>intimations about things I should probably learn about. For example, 
>>someone just mentioned tw_cli maint verify, is that a 3ware thing or a 
>>ext3 thing? And the fact that there is a 3ware knowledgebase (e.g. 
>>http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=13247 should help.
>>So what else do I need to know?
>>-T
>>
>>
>>
>>[Philosophy] There is nothing that somebody, somewhere, will not
>>consider immoral. --Jan.Six@uku.fi
>
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