Very Poor Raid Card Performance

[Steven Lowry]

On Tue, January 16, 2007 18:13, Bill Moran wrote:
> In response to "Steven Lowry" <steve at midden.org>:
>>
>> I have been very impressed with my FreeBSD 6.2 install, I have nearly
>> everything working but there are a few things which I need help with.
>>
>> The main problem is my HD performance, it is approx 6x slower than in
>> windows XP, hopefully there is a solution. I have an LSI Megaraid 8x
>> with
>> four drives in a raid 5 configuration, in windows I was getting up to
>> 60MB/s
>> transfer rates but in FBSD I am getting up to 9MB/s. I followed the
>> instructions in the handbook for tuning disks and I have set dma on.
>> Being new to unix, I have no idea what to try or get system information
>> too continue troubleshooting.
>> If anyone could point me in the right direction or to appropriate
>> documentation
>> it would be much appreciated.
>
> You should provide the details of how you arrived at those numbers.
> Please provide details of your testing methodology.
>
> While it's impossible to compare apples to apples when pitting Windows
> against FreeBSD, you at least want to be comparing two fruits -- not
> apples and buffalo steaks or something like that.

Thanks for your reply,

I repeatedly copied a 700MB file from one harddrive to the Raid 5 Drive, a
different file every time so caching won't be a large factor and consistantly
got 8-9MB/s. Copying such large files is something I do on a daily basis.
Hardly scientific, more of a real use scenario. Transfer was done via KDE.

Here is the dmesg output for the controller;

amr0: <LSILogic MegaRAID 1.53> mem
0xfa2f0000-0xfa2fffff,0xfe800000-0xfe8fffff irq 30 at device 14.0 on pci5
amr0: delete logical drives supported by controller
amr0: <LSILogic LSI MegaRAID SATA300-8X PCI-X> Firmware 814D, BIOS H431,
128MB RAM
amrd0: <LSILogic MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
amrd0: 712392MB (1458978816 sectors) RAID 5 (optimal)

Not sure what is meant by the delete line.
Motherboard is an Iwill DK8N, Nforce3 Chipset, AMD 8131 PCI-X bridge.
The nvidia raid is populated by two WD raptors in a raid 1, this holds FBSD,
the LSI is for data storage.

Any other information I could supply?

Steve...
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