Re: Experience with HP Smart Array P400 and SATA drives?

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 2:22 AM, Mario Weilguni <mweilguni@sime.com> wrote:
> Has anyone benchmarked this controller (PCIe/4x, 512 MB BBC)? We try to use
> it with 8x SATA 1TB drives in RAID-5 mode under Linux, and measure strange
> values. An individual drive is capable of delivering 91 MB/sec sequential
> read performance, and we get values ~102MB/sec out of a 8-drive RAID5, seems
> to be ridiculous slow. Write performance seems to be much better, ~300 MB
> /sec - seems ok to me.
>
> I guess I must be doing something wrong, I cannot believe that a 500 €
> controller is delivering such poor performance.

A few suggestions...  Try to find the latest driver for your card, try
using the card as nothing but a caching controller and run your RAID
on software in linux (or whatever IS you're on).  Test a 2 drive
RAID-0 to see what kind of performance increase you get.  If you can't
dd a big file off of a RAID-0 at about 2x the rate of a single drive
then something IS wrong with it. Try RAID 10.  Try RAID-1 sets on the
controller and RAID 0 over that in software.