From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Justin Piszcz Subject: Linux SW RAID: HW Raid Controller/JBOD vs. Multiple PCI-e Cards? Date: Sat, 5 May 2007 12:33:49 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Cc: xfs@oss.sgi.com List-Id: linux-raid.ids Question, I currently have a 965 chipset-based motherboard, use 4 port onboard and several PCI-e x1 controller cards for a raid 5 of 10 raptor drives. I get pretty decent speeds: user@host$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=100gb bs=1M count=102400 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 247.134 seconds, 434 MB/s real 4m7.164s user 0m0.223s sys 3m3.505s user@host$ time dd if=100gb of=/dev/null bs=1M count=102400 102400+0 records in 102400+0 records out 107374182400 bytes (107 GB) copied, 172.588 seconds, 622 MB/s real 2m52.631s user 0m0.212s sys 1m50.905s user@host$ Also, when I run simultaenous dd's from all of the drives, I see 850-860MB/s, I am curious if there is some kind of limitation with software raid as to why I am not getting better than 500MB/s for sequential write speed? With 7 disks, I got about the same speed, adding 3 more for a total of 10 did not seem to help in regards to write. However, read improved to 622MBs/ from about 420-430MB/s. However, if I want to upgrade to more than 12 disks, I am out of PCI-e slots, so I was wondering, does anyone on this list run a 16 port Areca or 3ware card and use it for JBOD? What kind of performance do you see when using mdadm with such a card? Or if anyone uses mdadm with less than a 16 port card, I'd like to hear what kind of experiences you have seen with that type of configuration. Justin.