Hardware RAID adaptors and FreeBSD (was Re: ARECA ARC-1120 RAID adaptor

[Mike Tancsa]

At 02:08 PM 09/03/2005, Mike Tancsa wrote:

>FYI, I placed an order for one of the PCI-X 4 port versions today. I 
>should have it in 2 weeks or so and will summarize my FreeBSD experiences 
>with it then.


Got the card today and so far so good!  The RAID5 is *really* quite fast 
compared to the older 8000 series 3ware.  The drives are the same as before 
as is the rest of the hardware (see previous postings).  Just the raid card 
has changed. FCIII=Fedora 3.  The tests in each case was done with the OS 
on a separate drive and the /mnt partition one big partition off the raid 
controller.

               -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- 
--Random--
               -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- 
--Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec 
%CPU
twe      2000 33789 25.8 34065  8.3 14038  3.8 47484 44.6  67316  9.5 
2873.7  5.7
FCIII    2000 28073 62.0 22391  4.3 12189  2.0 17577 35.5 102132  5.5 
1853.7  2.5
ARECA    2000 67648 52.0 63716 17.1 32715  8.5 59734 56.1  76906 11.1 
5686.4 11.3
          3000 72200 55.7 64210 17.0 32635  8.5 58834 55.5  79055 
11.2  329.9  0.9

PostMark v1.5 : 3/27/01
pm>set size 300 100000
pm>set transactions 400000
pm>set location /mnt
pm>run
Creating files...Done
Performing transactions..........Done
Deleting files...Done
Time:
         1287 seconds total
         1287 seconds of transactions (310 per second)

Files:
         200107 created (155 per second)
                 Creation alone: 500 files (500 per second)
                 Mixed with transactions: 199607 files (155 per second)
         199905 read (155 per second)
         199384 appended (154 per second)
         200107 deleted (155 per second)
                 Deletion alone: 889 files (889 per second)
                 Mixed with transactions: 199218 files (154 per second)

Data:
         12715.55 megabytes read (9.88 megabytes per second)
         12728.92 megabytes written (9.89 megabytes per second)
pm>


The card has source code drivers for FreeBSD 4 and 5 available (i386 and 
amd64 at ftp.areca.com.tw) on their FTP site as well as a binary cli and 
http app that allows you to monitor and configure all aspects of the 
card.  The drive shows up as a scsi device so a user can use sysinstall to 
fdisk / disklabel it.  Compiled and loaded the drivers via kld and

arcmsr0: <ARECA ARC1110 PCI-X 4 PORTS SATA RAID CONTROLLER
Driver Version 1.20.00.02> mem 0xf9000000-0xf9000fff irq 18 at device 14.0 
on pci2.

I configured the RAID5 array from the web and a camcontrol rescan all shows

da0 at arcmsr0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Areca Volume Set # 00 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit), Tagged Queueing 
Enabled
da0: 715255MB (1464843264 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 91182C)


I havent really brutalized the card and drivers yet, but running 2 dozen 
bonnie -s 200 -d & in the background does not lock up the machine, and 
despite all the io going on, the machine is still fairly responsive

It would be really great to see support for this card as part of 
FreeBSD.  The source code seems to imply a BSD'ish header, so perhaps this 
will be possible

         ---Mike