From owner-freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Mar 2 22:51:04 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4AA4E106566B for ; Mon, 2 Mar 2009 22:51:04 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from andrew@modulus.org) Received: from email.octopus.com.au (email.octopus.com.au [122.100.2.232]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0BD008FC13 for ; Mon, 2 Mar 2009 22:51:03 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from andrew@modulus.org) Received: by email.octopus.com.au (Postfix, from userid 1002) id 01DED17E6B; Tue, 3 Mar 2009 09:33:36 +1100 (EST) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.3 (2007-08-08) on email.octopus.com.au X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.4 required=10.0 tests=ALL_TRUSTED autolearn=failed version=3.2.3 Received: from [10.20.30.100] (60.218.233.220.exetel.com.au [220.233.218.60]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: admin@email.octopus.com.au) by email.octopus.com.au (Postfix) with ESMTP id DF36C17E50; Tue, 3 Mar 2009 09:33:32 +1100 (EST) Message-ID: <49AC5EB3.4020601@modulus.org> Date: Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:33:23 +1100 From: Andrew Snow User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 (Windows/20061207) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Josh Paetzel , freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.org References: <09CE3D22-431A-433F-9CAF-6896FF77DDB1@tcbug.org> In-Reply-To: <09CE3D22-431A-433F-9CAF-6896FF77DDB1@tcbug.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: Re: twa driver and 3ware 9690SA issues X-BeenThere: freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: SCSI subsystem List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:51:04 -0000 Josh Paetzel wrote: > Which wasn't that much of an issue, as SATA drives aren't capable of > sustained sequential 100 MB/sec transfers anyways As Scott said, this number is not reflective of actual negotiated rate, and is nothing to worry about. > u0 RAID-10 OK - - 64K 596.025 ON OFF > 838860800 bytes transferred in 6.923690 secs (121158052 bytes/sec) > Kind of what I expect, and faster than 100 Megs/sec Well, that's a RAID10 and capable of doing much faster than 120MB/s. Sorry, but you cannot expect anywhere near close to the theoretical unformatted maximum media transfer rate of the disks you're testing, especially under FreeBSD and UFS. Testing the raw disks doesn't necessarily help either because then there's no operating system read-ahead or write-caching, which is necessary to lower the latency between access requests. I don't believe you're getting any SCSI or 3ware problems - just FreeBSD kernel and filesystem issues. UFS is performance is a bit bizarre: for example I see faster sequential write speeds than read speeds! ZFS improves the situation alot and I get much closer to the theoritical max with my drives. To give you an idea of how much more efficient ZFS is: I had a 16 disk 3ware SATA RAID6, with UFS, and battery-backed cache. I converted to a 14 disk ZFS software RAIDZ2 with a smaller 3ware mirrored boot disk. Quick benchmarked using dd as follows: Creating a 6GB file: UFS+3ware=308mb/s ZFS=357mb/s Reading a 6GB file: UFS+3ware=113mb/s ZFS=424mb/s - Andrew