Re: 3Ware 9x00 controllers

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Pasi Pirhonen wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 11:34:27AM +0200, Remco Barendse wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Pasi Pirhonen wrote:
>>
>>> Just to comment this part. I would not hurry too much with this
>>> updayte. My initial testing shows some 30% performance degration with
>>> this new driver + firmware. The driver actually is pretty much same as
>>> in 'trasferring linux scsi-layer request to the firmware and back', but
>>> there is this new (shouldn't this be available begining of summer?) BBU
>>> (Batter Backup Unit?) support for cache, so the ~100MB of your cache
>>> won't 'stay on it's way to the platter' when one does loose suddently
>>> power from the box :)
>>
>> Oooooops! The card is already flashed but ok.
>>
>
> As i said, it's reverseable (thank god) by just booting the previous
> version of the driver. That just flashes the previous version of
> firmware back in while loading.

OK :)  Hopefully the 3w-9xxx driver will still be included in u3, guess it 
will be the old version then?


>>> Good thing is that one is able to boot back to the previous version of
>>> driver. The driver just flashes the old firmware in at boot.
>>>
>>> I am actually doing some numbers now with this old firmware to be
>>> compared to new one. I didn't do much 'logging' with this x86-64 box
>>> having 3w-9xxx and the ia32-box isn't available for testing anymore
>>> (there is almoust 800GB data already which i won't play with :).
>>
>> Great, if you have the results let's both raise an issue at
>> 3ware about it, hopefully they'll improve the driver.
>
> It's more like 10% for general (sequential read/write and random
> read/write).
>
> Mostly the sequentila writing being slower a lot.
>
> before it wrote like 90+MB/s for single thread. That slowing down to
> like 70+MB/s for 8 paralle threads.
>
> Now it's in range of 70-MB/s for single and some 65+MB/s for 8 threads.
>
> I really have to make some more testing still tho, so let this be 'one
> more shot update' for this.

Seems kinda slow, even 90 mb/sec. Are you using hardware raid 5 or 
software raid?

I have an old PATA 3Ware 7850 with 5 drives attached to it (the card is in 
a 32 bit 33 mhz pci slot) which gets to the max of the pci bus (just over 
100 mb/sec). I am using hardware raid 5 on it. Recently performance 
dropped dramatically though, I suspect this is caused by adding a large 
number of small files to the array or a faulty drive.


>>
>> If the box boots after install I'll post some benchmarks of my array with
>> 4 raptors.
>>
>
> that should not make the sequential writes any faster as the fabric
> itself seems to be saturating at about 100MB/s (i think that is
> supposed to be the write speed for 9500-seris).
>
> Raptors being 10k drives maybe affect for random access patterns tho.
>
>
>
> --
> Pasi Pirhonen - [email protected] - http://iki.fi/upi/