Performance problem with adaptec 2120S

[Scott Long]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 amon at sockar.homeip.net wrote:
> hi,
>
> I have a problem with my new adaptec 2120S, I cannot get more than
> 3 MB/s when writing to it.
>
> My card has firmware 4.0-0[6008] and is connected to an sca backplane
> with 3 ultra 160 disks on it, all in a single RAID 5 volume. The card
> is plugged in a 32 bits/33 Mhz pci slot and the installed freebsd version
> is 4.9-R.
>
> When I do a file transfer from another box, I see in systat that aac0
> is 100% busy at 3MB/s during the copy. Since this card is U320, I sincerely
> hope it can do better but I couldn't find the source of the problem.
> I tried setting all devices at 160MB/s non packetized in the controller
> config with no luck. Same thing with other disks.
>
> Is this a known issue ?
>
> I can provide full dmesg if necessary.
>

The 2120S has some unfortunate issues that make it a slow card.  However,
it should not be nearly as slow as you claim.  Do you have the 'aaccli'
tools installed?  If not, you can either install it from the FreeBSD ports
collection, or use the Linux version that is found on the 2120S CD under
emulation.  That should be able to tell you basic information about the
array and if there are any problems.  More advanced information can be
gathered by using the 'diag dump text' command in aaccli.  If you could
send me the output from that, I might be able to help.

Scott