suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Chris Hedley]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Gibson, Jasen (GE Indust, ConsInd, consultant) wrote:
> I'm using the same card, Chris.  My setup is a Tyan S2881 dual Opteron board and 4 WD RE2 400GB drives in a RAID 5.
> My speed varies greatly, depending how large a file I'm accessing (which is an expected result, I think).  Files less than a GB, write at about around 130MB/s, read between 400-600MB/s  (have not ruled out whether cache is helping boost this number).  Files over 10GB this drops to a read speed of 40GB, like you've seen.  But the write speed will stay up at around 90!  It's very odd.  I've been seeing similar posts to this for a while now, concerning Highpoint, 3ware, Qlogic, and Adaptec cards and freebsd 5.4+; it almost makes me wonder if there's not another factor here, drivers or something.
> I have not seen any of the timeouts you mention.  Considering I'm running a Mysql-driven forum off of this, Mysql should be hanging up quite often if this were happening.
> I've just been using dd to come up with these numbers.  Are there any true disk benchmarking utils out there for BSD?

Something has just occurred to me, admittedly rather late in the game, so 
please excuse me for being dense!  What firmware revision are you using on 
your 2410?  I've just gone into aaccli and asked it "controller details" 
and it tells me I'm running build 7244, which is pretty ancient.  I've a 
mind to update it (well, it needs two updates in sequence) which I'm 
rather loth to do as it means backing the whole thing up which takes 
forever, and hoping I still have a usable Windows installation or DOS boot 
floppy as Adaptec seem to insist on releasing updates as DOS executables.

Chris.