new server motherboard with SATA II

[soralx at cydem.org]

I wrote:
> > How about something like this:
> > http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330240176734
> > (PERC 5/i SAS RAID controller HBA, PCIe x8, 256MB RAM) -- $120
> >
> > This should give you ~300-400 MB/s with your 5 drives. It might not work
> > with your mainboard, though -- but there's a trick to isolate SMBus pins
> > the card edge connector (search the Net).
> 
> Definately has potential.

Scratch that, the card's performance is super low, lower than the grass.
I'm testing it right now with two 15k.4 Cheetahs in mirror RAID. Two
simultaneous reads [0] give ~19MB/s each (the drives can do >90MB/s each).
Looks like the drives are getting thrashed with seeks (i.e., it can't read
from both simultaneously!). Write performance [1] is only 50MB/s for single
thread, and 20MB/s for 2 threads. bonnie++ measures ~22MB/s for writes too;
the other figures look respectable, though, and blogbench shows some all
right results (I can redo benchmarks and copy the results later if anyone
cares).

Maybe it performs better in striped arrays. I remember seeing figures like
500MB/s on forums, but I guess they tested only one thread at a time.

[0] `dd if=/dev/mfid0 bs=64k count=65535 &`
    `dd if=/dev/mfid0 bs=64k count=65535 skip=132768 &`
[1] dd'ing to file[s] on UFS2 slice


> I think I might first focus on a motherboard that has a well supported  
> IO chipset.  If I can get over 200Mb accross the whole array then I'll  
> be happy.
> 
> After that I will look at a decent quality raid card.
> 
> -D

[SorAlx]  ridin' VS1400