Hi,

What I have to say probably will be of very little help, but anyway:
We have here an IBM NAS 200, which has a ServeRaid 4H + 6 7200 rpm
72GB disks. It came as a raid5 (+hotswap) and I still did not try other
confs.
It came with 3 logical disks, of sizes 6GB, 12GB and 260GB.
I ran zcav on the third one several times. On the first times it had
many points in which it went down to between 10MB/s and 45MB/s (which
was the maximum, and it was close to it most of the time). On the last
runs it never went below 42MB/s.

I can try to make a stripe/mirror/other stuff on it - it's not yet
production.

The short answer: I guess 45MB/s is the maximum of each single disk,
and raid5 did not give better results on the maximum. Are you sure
a stripe of two should give twice the speed of one? Do the specs
say so?

Did/Can you try Linux's software raid? If you do, you might get better
results by connecting one drive to each card (happened to me with IDE -
yes, I know SCSI is way faster/more efficient/more expensive).

Did your disks gave (individually) constant throuput, or (as is common)
faster in the beginning and slower in the end? Did the raid at least
made that better (as I think it did for me)?

I don't mind giving the graphs, but I do not think it's allowed to
publish them as a formal benchmark (even more so considering it was
a donation of IBM).

About the 32/33/64/66: I am not sure the card works the same under
all conditions (except the PCI bottleneck). Maybe it also works
slower in the communication to the disks, when running under 32/33?
Does the spec say anything about that?

BTW, I don't know HD-Tach and Sandra, but zcav+gnuplot give me very
nice graphs (at least for my taste).
Try:
$ zcav /dev/xxx > somefile
$ gnuplot
gnuplot> plot "somefile"

You can also try to run two zcavs on them (without raid). Both on
the same card and on different ones. I would love to see the results
(and don't mind giving mine, with those IDE disks).
-- 
Didi


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