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Date:      Thu, 22 Nov 2001 04:05:53 -0800 (PST)
From:      John Engelhart <johne@zang.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Bizzare Adaptec 3210S results
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.21.0111220335070.24545-100000@zang.com>

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I'm having the oddest problems with an Adaptec 3210S controller in
FreeBSD.  Eight drives, four to a channel, initially set up as a RAID 0/5.

After spending a day in this configuration and getting horrible
performance (the lone IDE drive in the system was beating it out, but only
slightly), I decided it was time to start from scratch.

Rebuilt as a pure RAID 0 array performance went up considerably.  But look
at this:

Version 1.01d       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
localhost        8G 69499  87 112164 60 18697  12 51132  98 56762  27 316.6 5

Writes twice the speed of reads!?  Did hell freeze over?

I'm curious to hear anyones opinion on why write performance is besting
read performance.  For reference, the RAID 0/5 performance was around
27-33Mb/s across the board.

Even more appreciated is pointers to where the problem lies.  I may end up
going through the hassel of installing another OS and using it to
benchmark the RAID to eliminate FreeBSD from the list of
problems.  Write-back is enabled.  Soft-updates are enabled.  The drives
are fast, 15K seagate ones that individually start at a minimum of
47Mb/sec.  This thing should be close to pushing the 64/33 PCI bus it's
on.

Anyone else have this card?  Offer any pointers?  Even a "Yea, you should
be doing better than that" would be helpful.

As a curiosity item, both the boot rom utility and the dptmgr util report
the PCI bus a 528Mb/s, or 64/66.  The AMD 760 chipset only does 64/33.


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