Re: [PATCH] [2.4.XX] Silicon Image/CMD Medley Software RAID

[tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk]

Hi Thomas,

While we are on the subject of Silicon Image hardware, I wanted to ask ---
is this normal that this hardware (boxed as "EIO AP-1680 IDE RAID card"), see
this URL for more info):

http://www.ivmm.com/eio/products_ap1680.html

so horrendously slow, without even using any of its RAID functions (which
would be slow understandably as they are software RAID)?

Numbers. My IDE drives perform 22-25M/sec (hdparm -t) when connected
to the onboard IDE controller (6BXD SMP motherboard, old, 2xPIII550, 1G RAM) but when  connected to this RAID card and used as plain physical disks (no RAID sets configured) they give 2M/sec using DMA and 4M/sec when I disable DMA.

I see many people mentioning Silicon Image hardware here, so I assumed
it is a useable hardware, but if everyone is getting 2M/sec (or 4M/sec and hog
the whole system performance with PIO!) then am I the first one who noticed
that the king is, in fact, naked? Shouldn't I expect a decent 20-25M/sec hdparm -t
from the drives connected to the additional IDE card (be it RAID or no RAID, just
extra IDE slots)?

Kind regards
Tigran