promise sx4000 card & tx4000 results over 170mb/s sustained read

[Pedram Nimreezi]

I have a raid10 configuration with 4 western digital 8mb cache 120gig hard 
drives
using a 2400a controller from adaptec on a dual 2400 xeon with 2 gigs ECC ram
I'm doing the same tests... I'm getting 33mb/s. I got the controller because I
figured it would be better to use a hardware solution... Does all this 
sound right?
I should be getting much better results shouldn't I? After striping and 
mirroing i get
220 gigs free and from a report I read this configuration gets better 
performance
from the 2400A 
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/adaptec-2400a.html


At 09:00 PM 7/17/2003 -0700, Trent George wrote:
>Hi Soren,
>
>I wanted to congratulate you on fantastic results in performance on a 
>tx4000 card.
>
>I have a dual amd mb with 66mhz support slot. 4 western digital drives 
>(180gb each)
>
>I have clocked sustained 176mb/s read from this raid0 array and 120+mb/s write
>
>writes seemed cpu bound ? (50% idle from second processor)
>reads 56% idle (first process close to maxed out)
>
>there were several tricks to getting this performance, custom kernel compile
>
>1/ MAXPHYS=256k
>2/ MAXBSIZE=256k
>3/ atacontrol create RAID0 128 /dev/ad4 /dev/ad6 /dev/ad8 /dev/ad10
>4/ newfs -U bs=262144 /dev/ar0
>
>this allowed 64kb stripe size to use 4 drives on each "block" parallel reading
>
>i used iostat to monitor processor and transfer rate using following commands
>
>dd of=test.dat if=/dev/zero bs=64k count=20000
>dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=64k
>
>Question #2
>
>I purchased a sx4000 card in the hope to increase speed :-)
>I noticed that PDC20621 is not in ata-chipset.c yet
>The card is not recognised on boot ether.
>
>Is there anything I can do or provide to help you add support for this card ?
>
>Question #3
>
>Is there any plans to support intel SATA raid support on ICH5R (i865/i875) 
>for boot up (sort of like promise and highpoint)
>
>I have been experimenting with gigabit ethernet and sustained 100mb/s 
>samba read/write performance, and seem to be making good progress.
>
>also experimenting on huge writeback cache (400mb+) up from 1mb 
>vfs.hirunningspace
>seems to help with impressive burst network transfer speed.
>
>
>Thanks
>
>Trent George
>
>
>PS I don't know if you remember but I sent an amd system to you a long 
>time ago to help add support for highpoint chipsets, I appreciate all your 
>great work.
>
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