Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Patrick Petermair]

Hi!

Yesterday I've setup a server with Adaptec's 1210SA SATA Controller and 
2 SATA disks. According to the kernel changelog the controller is 
supported since 2.6.2

I've installed Debian on an IDE disk, built a 2.6.3 kernel with 
CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL, rebooted and the kernel detected the controller 
plus both SATA disks (sda, sdb). As the next step I wanted to create a 
software raid 1 with the 2 SATA disks. Because it took mdadm forever to 
finish, I checked /proc/mdstat and saw a progress bar with a rate of 12MB/s!

Even my oldest IDE disk is faster than this. Is there a way to tweak the 
SATA controller/disk with some kernel-options or is the driver not 
providing more speed?

Any hints?
Thanks..
Patrick

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Hugo Mills]

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On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 03:10:15PM +0100, Patrick Petermair wrote:
> Yesterday I've setup a server with Adaptec's 1210SA SATA Controller and 
> 2 SATA disks. According to the kernel changelog the controller is 
> supported since 2.6.2
> 
> I've installed Debian on an IDE disk, built a 2.6.3 kernel with 
> CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL, rebooted and the kernel detected the controller 
> plus both SATA disks (sda, sdb). As the next step I wanted to create a 
> software raid 1 with the 2 SATA disks. Because it took mdadm forever to 
> finish, I checked /proc/mdstat and saw a progress bar with a rate of 12MB/s!
> 
> Even my oldest IDE disk is faster than this. Is there a way to tweak the 
> SATA controller/disk with some kernel-options or is the driver not 
> providing more speed?

   You don't say what make of disk these are. It may be that you've
fallen foul of the Seagate/SiI erratum, which (as far as I can tell)
still kills performance. I have a 120GiB Seagate disk attached to a
SiI3112 controller, and I'm lucky if I get 12MiB/s with the IDE-layer
driver. I haven't tried the libata driver yet.

   I'm not too worried about that set-up, because I don't need massive
performance off that disk anyway, but something faster might be
nice. :)

   Hugo.

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=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
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Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Jeff Garzik]

Patrick Petermair wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Yesterday I've setup a server with Adaptec's 1210SA SATA Controller and 
> 2 SATA disks. According to the kernel changelog the controller is 
> supported since 2.6.2
> 
> I've installed Debian on an IDE disk, built a 2.6.3 kernel with 
> CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL, rebooted and the kernel detected the controller 
> plus both SATA disks (sda, sdb). As the next step I wanted to create a 
> software raid 1 with the 2 SATA disks. Because it took mdadm forever to 
> finish, I checked /proc/mdstat and saw a progress bar with a rate of 
> 12MB/s!


Do you have Seagate disks?

	Jeff

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Kyle Wong]

as I know, the kernel limit the raid reconstuction speed to 10MB/s, check
/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max and echo something like bigger into it.

Kyle

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Bob Glamm]

> >Yesterday I've setup a server with Adaptec's 1210SA SATA Controller and 
> >2 SATA disks. According to the kernel changelog the controller is 
> >supported since 2.6.2
> >
> >I've installed Debian on an IDE disk, built a 2.6.3 kernel with 
> >CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL, rebooted and the kernel detected the controller 
> >plus both SATA disks (sda, sdb). As the next step I wanted to create a 
> >software raid 1 with the 2 SATA disks. Because it took mdadm forever to 
> >finish, I checked /proc/mdstat and saw a progress bar with a rate of 
> >12MB/s!

More to the point, why didn't you just install a 2.4.18 kernel
and use the Adaptec-supplied driver and the RAID-1 capabilities
built into the card's firmware?  (Note, I'm not trying to disparage
Jeff's work on libata here.)

I have this setup and it works flawlessly with a pair of 160GB
SATA drives.

-Bob

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Jeff Garzik]

Bob Glamm wrote:
>>>Yesterday I've setup a server with Adaptec's 1210SA SATA Controller and 
>>>2 SATA disks. According to the kernel changelog the controller is 
>>>supported since 2.6.2
>>>
>>>I've installed Debian on an IDE disk, built a 2.6.3 kernel with 
>>>CONFIG_SCSI_SATA_SIL, rebooted and the kernel detected the controller 
>>>plus both SATA disks (sda, sdb). As the next step I wanted to create a 
>>>software raid 1 with the 2 SATA disks. Because it took mdadm forever to 
>>>finish, I checked /proc/mdstat and saw a progress bar with a rate of 
>>>12MB/s!
> 
> 
> More to the point, why didn't you just install a 2.4.18 kernel
> and use the Adaptec-supplied driver and the RAID-1 capabilities
> built into the card's firmware?  (Note, I'm not trying to disparage
> Jeff's work on libata here.)
> 
> I have this setup and it works flawlessly with a pair of 160GB
> SATA drives.

There are no RAID-1 capabilities built into the card's firmware :)

It's all software RAID.

	Jeff

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Patrick Petermair]

Hi!

Sorry, for replying so late .. was a busy week and didn't have access to 
the server until today.

> Do you have Seagate disks?

Yup, 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (80GB). Any problems with Seagate and 
Adaptec 1210SA?

Thanks so far,
Patrick

Re: Adaptec 1210SA SATA Controller Performance

[Hugo Mills]

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On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 04:40:23PM +0100, Patrick Petermair wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Sorry, for replying so late .. was a busy week and didn't have access to 
> the server until today.
> 
> >Do you have Seagate disks?
> 
> Yup, 2 Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (80GB). Any problems with Seagate and 
> Adaptec 1210SA?

   Yes.

   There is a known problem with Seagate's SATA drives and the SiI
3112 controller that is used on the Adaptec 1210SA. The difficulty is
that certain [common] transfer sizes have to be split up into two
transfers in order to avoid triggering the erratum (which hangs the
machine, IIRC). This drops performance drastically. There is currently
no solution to the low performance of the Seagate/SiI combination.

   Hugo.

-- 
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
  PGP key: 1C335860 from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk
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