Motherboard query...

[Michael Prinkey]

Robert,

I will add my own two cents.  I have built several software RAID servers 
with different motherboards and Promise Ultra66/100 controllers.  My best 
performing servers to date used 80-GB Maxtor 5400-RPM drives, two Ultra100 
controllers, and the Intel i850 motherboard.  I used two drives per channel 
on the Promise cards (I know...that is supposed to be bad) and two drives on 
the on-board secondary controller.  Ten 80-GB drives are configured as 8 
data + 1 parity + 1 hot spare.

Bonnie numbers are below.  Write 28.5 MB/s, read 56.1 MB/s.

I think that performance would be better if the raid drives only touched the 
Promise controllers.  Also, I haven't seen any performance advantage to 
using one drive per EIDE channel.  For smaller 4-drive arrays, the results 
are essentially identical.

Mike Prinkey
Aeolus Research, Inc.

-----
Bonnie 1.2: File '/raid//Bonnie.1423', size: 1048576000, volumes: 10
Writing with putc()...         done:  17551 kB/s  96.7 %CPU
Rewriting...                   done:  20181 kB/s  13.3 %CPU
Writing intelligently...       done:  28519 kB/s  16.8 %CPU
Reading with getc()...         done:  18204 kB/s  92.7 %CPU
Reading intelligently...       done:  56106 kB/s   9.9 %CPU
Seek numbers calculated on first volume only
Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start 'em...done...done...done...
              ---Sequential Output (nosync)--- ---Sequential Input-- --Rnd 
Seek-
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --04k 
(03)-
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU   /sec 
%CPU
raid04 10*1000 17551 96.7 28519 16.8 20181 13.3 18204 92.7 56106  9.9  101.6 
  0.8



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