LSI MegaRaid 150-6

[Conall O'Brien]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 09:55:28PM -0500, timt at sharktech.net wrote:

> This is the 2nd time I search for a resolution on this matter I could not find
> any documents online regarding this issue. 
> We are building a system with the following hardware: 
> 
> Tyan S2882 Dual Opteron Board (latest BIOS) 
> 2 x Opteron 244 CPU's 
> 2 x 1GB DDR PC3200+ 
> LSI MegaRaid 150-6 (Intel SRCS16) (latest firmware)
> Intel Pro SC 1000 Fiber NIC 
> 5 x 200GB 7.2KRPM 8MBuffer Western Digital (each hard drive has been checked for
> any problem)
> 
> At first we started installing FreeBSD5.4-RELEASE AMD64 LSI Megaraid was
> detected and raid was running in optimal. When it asked me to choose the slice
> it gave me a warning that the geometry for the drive is incorrect and to check
> with the BIOS for the true geometry and if this is a SCSI please check with the
> controller's algorithem (something). Which I searched online for with no clues.

What RAID configuration are you using? 0, 1, 5, 10 or 50? 


Is your RAID array partitioned or sliced at all? If so, how many
partitions and/or slices do you have and of what sizes?  

> Anyways went to system installation it starts installing bursting to 2600KB/s
> and after 55% it goes down to 800KB/s than when reaching ports it goes down to
> 33KB/s and this is CDROM installation!! 
> 
> When system is installed completly we ran dd on the system a constant average of
> 2.1MB/s is the BEST performance we could get! 
> 
> We tried installing Windows XP for testing and performance was decent bursting
> to 70MB/s (which is the average on this controller). We tried FreeBSD5.3(I386)
> and FreeBSD4.11(i386) same problem. Please if anyone have any idea whats going
> on we really don't wanna go with Linux on this system!! 

I've the 150-6 setup in an old Digital Alpha system with 4 x 250GB
Hitachi Deskstar disks. Under both 4.11 (well, RELENG_4) and 5.4
(RELENG_5) I have no performance issues with my RAID 5 setup. I've seen
write speeds over 15MB/s (yes, B not b) when transferring large CAD 
related files onto my fileserver.


Can you provide some better benchmark data please? I'd recommend using
bonnie++ (See benchmarks/bonnie++ in the Port Collection) and we'll see
if we can find the problem.

-- 

Regards,

Conall O'Brien

Systems and Network Administrator
School Of Mathematics
University Of Dublin, Trinity College