On Wednesday August 24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> The RAID5 configuration is: 8 SATA disks, 8 port Marvel SATA PCI-X 
> controller chip (SuperMicro board), Dual Xeon, 1 GB RAM, stripe size 
> 64K, no spare disk.
> 
> Measurements are performed to the ram md device with:
> disktest -PT -T30 -h1 -K8 -B65536 -ID /dev/md0
> using the default stripe size (64K). 128K stripe size does not make a 
> real difference.

May I suggest you try creating a filesystem on the device and doing
tests in the filesystem?  I have found the raw device slower that
filesystem access before, and a quick test shows writing to the
filesystem (ext3) is about 4 times as fast as writing to /dev/md1 on a
6 drive raid5 array.

> 
> If Linux uses "stripe write" why is it so much slower than HW Raid? Is 
> it disabled by default?

No, it is never disabled.  However it can only work if raid5 gets a
full stripe of data before being asked to flush that data.  Writing to
/dev/md0 directly may cause flushes too often.


Does your application actually require writing to the raw device, or
will you be using a filesystem?  

NeilBrown
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