Known issues with ZFS on ICH10R (Intel G45)?

[Federico Maggi]

Hi All,

On Sunday, March 27, 2011, Michael Fuckner <michael at fuckner.net> wrote:
> On 03/27/11 11:35, Maggi Federico wrote:
>> My only concern is the ICH10R SATA RAID controller. I've read that
>> ZFS likes full access to the disks, and that built-in RAID systems
>> (even if disabled) may lead to poor performances or, worst, errors.
> Hi,
>
> it can be configured in Bios either es plain AHCI or Raid (which is a firmware/driver raid, not something you expect when hearing the word "RAID"). Pick AHCI and everything is fine.

    I've tested this machine on FreeBSD 8.2 (FreeNAS 0.8 RC5) and
assigned vm.kmem_size/vm.kmem_size_max=512M, plus other options as
suggested by the FreeBSD ZFS Tuning Guide. I put 4G of RAM and
currently installed a 32bit Celeron, while waiting for a 64bit to be
shipped.

I've been running some preliminary tests that turn out extremely
unsatisfactory. For example:

    $ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/data/test bs=2M

was able to reach 150MB/s (on RAIDZ, four 300MB/s-SATA HDs). Is there
something wrong on my testing or it's the SATA chipset driver support?

Also, the network transfer rate on a gigabit LAN are very poor as
well. For example, I've tried to scopy a 5GB-file and it didn't go
beyond 10MB/s in both directions.

Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
-F