FreeBSD 5.3b7and poor ata performance
Chuck Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Mon Oct 25 16:05:32 PDT 2004
Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 6:08 PM -0400 2004-10-25, Charles Swiger wrote:
>> There's a Sun E450 with ten disks over 5 SCSI channels in the room
>> next door: one UW channel native on the MB, and two U160 channels
>> apiece from two dual-channel cards which come with each 8-drive-bay
>> extender kit.
>
> You've got an average of two disks per SCSI channel, and how many
> disks per channel on those 8-drive bays?
The Sun E450 base unit came with a 4-drive bay and 1 channel. Sun sells (or
sold?) kits that add 8-drive bays & a dual-channel card. You can put two kits
in, for a total of twenty drives in the machine, in other words, so this
particular system is only half-full.
[ If it was full, there would be exactly 4 drives per channel. ]
Hmm, here's a picture of an E450 with one 8-drive bay kit installed; you can
see the two unused 80-pin SCA connectors where drives 10 and 11 [*] could go:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/E450/component.front_open_zoom.html
>> It's running Solaris and DiskSuite (ODS) now, but it
>> would be interesting to put FreeBSD on it and see how that does, if
>> I ever get the chance.
>
> In my experience, ODS never performed quite as good as Vinum, but it
> would be very interesting to see what kind of performance you can get
> out of this box using FreeBSD/SPARC64.
Yup. It would need to stop being used before I can play with it, though.
--
-Chuck
[*]: Counting from 0 to 19, of course.
More information about the freebsd-current
mailing list