Adaptec 2120 performance very poor - What now?

[Glenn Dawson]

At 08:33 PM 9/23/2005, Matt Hartzell wrote:
>I am experiencing very poor performance on an Adaptec 2120, and I 
>can see that (now) the 2120 is not a good choice for a highly used ftp server.
>
>Now that I have about 500G of data stored on it I really can't back 
>it up and rebuild it using some other controller.
>
>I know the 2200 can be swapped out for the 2120 with out rebuilding 
>the array, but in my testing the 2200 is just as poor when witting 
>to reading / writing to the same channel.
>
>What other products would provide faster performance under FreeBSD 
>AND support a seamless (no rebuild/reinstall/restore) migration?

I noticed the same thing with the 2120 cards that I've used in a 
number of systems.  Interestingly the first time I saw the 
performance problem was on a machine with FreeBSD 5.3.  All the other 
systems I had used the 2120 cards in were 4.x.

I ran a variety of comparisons between 4.x and 5.x using the exact 
same hardware, and saw approximately a 3:1 difference in sustained 
throughput, with the 4.x systems being faster.

Eventually I narrowed it down to the way newfs in 5.x was creating 
ufs1 file systems.  If I created the file system in 4.x and then 
mounted it in 5.x, performance between the two versions was nearly 
identical, with both measuring the same as only 4.x had done previously.

I posted a few times to this list and one of the others, but didn't 
get much response.  Eventually other factors made the performance 
difference moot, so I stopped pursuing it.

If anyone is interested, I can probably dig up most of the test data 
that I had, and give more detail about what I actually found.

-Glenn


>Thanks in advance for any and all help.
>
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