8.0-RELEASE/amd64 - full ZFS install - low read and write disk performance

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 08:02:58PM +0200, Dan Naumov wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Alexander Motin <mav at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > Artem Belevich wrote:
> >> aoc-sat2-mv8 was somewhat slower compared to ICH9 or LSI1068
> >> controllers when I tried it with 6 and 8 disks.
> >> I think the problem is that MV8 only does 32K per transfer and that
> >> does seem to matter when you have 8 drives hooked up to it. I don't
> >> have hard numbers, but peak throughput of MV8 with 8-disk raidz2 was
> >> noticeably lower than that of LSI1068 in the same configuration. Both
> >> LSI1068 and MV2 were on the same PCI-X bus. It could be a driver
> >> limitation. The driver for Marvel SATA controllers in NetBSD seems a
> >> bit more advanced compared to what's in FreeBSD.
> >
> > I also wouldn't recommend to use Marvell 88SXx0xx controllers now. While
> > potentially they are interesting, lack of documentation and numerous
> > hardware bugs make existing FreeBSD driver very limited there.
> >
> >> I wish intel would make cheap multi-port PCIe SATA card based on their
> >> AHCI controllers.
> >
> > Indeed. Intel on-board AHCI SATA controllers are fastest from all I have
> > tested. Unluckily, they are not producing discrete versions. :(
> >
> > Now, if discrete solution is really needed, I would still recommend
> > SiI3124, but with proper PCI-X 64bit/133MHz bus or built-in PCIe x8
> > bridge. They are fast and have good new siis driver.
> >
> >> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 3:29 AM, Pete French
> >> <petefrench at ticketswitch.com> wrote:
> >>>> I like to use pci-x with aoc-sat2-mv8 cards or pci-e cards....that way you
> >>>> get a lot more bandwidth..
> >>> I would goalong with that - I have precisely the same controller, with
> >>> a pair of eSATA drives, running ZFS mirrored. But I get a nice 100
> >>> meg/second out of them if I try. My controller is, however on PCI-X, not
> >>> PCI. It's a shame PCI-X appears to have gone the way of the dinosaur :-(
> >
> > --
> > Alexander Motin
> 
> Alexander, since you seem to be experienced in the area, what do you
> think of these 2 for use in a FreeBSD8 ZFS NAS:
> 
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ICH9/X7SPA.cfm?typ=H&IPMI=Y

Any of Supermicro's hardware with an ICH9 will be decent -- but you
should remember that there's still a good portion of the I/O
transactions which are CPU-bound.  The Atom CPU isn't exactly an
extensive workhorse.

If/once you get one, let me know so I can steal you as a beta tester for
getting X7SPA hardware monitoring (fans, external CPU temps, voltages)
working in bsdhwmon.  :-)

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |