SCSI RAID Performance

[istolyar]

I have LSI 320-2x controller with 8 Hitachi 15K 36GB drives with 0 RAID. I try to measure transfer rate and get approximately 100 mb/s. I called to LSI support and according LSI controller setup for best performance. It is very strange to get only 100 mb/s transfer with 320 controller. What good test utility I can use for test transfer/raid performance and why?s controller is has best performance

 

[sharkeeper]

What mainboard system do you have? The controller works best with a PCI-X slut at 133MHz.

What cache settings are you using and how many drives per channel, etc.?

I'm very familar with these controllers and get good results with them.

Cheers!

 

[istolyar]

I have IWILL dual Opteron board with PCI-X 133 slot. I have 8 drives on 1 channel. I can't use both because my back panel only 1 channel. All settings now according tech support optimized.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: sharkeeper
What mainboard system do you have? The controller works best with a PCI-X slut at 133MHz.

What cache settings are you using and how many drives per channel, etc.?

I'm very familar with these controllers and get good results with them.

Cheers!

Don't we all work best with sluts of some kind?

Bahahahahaha!!!!!! I couldn't resist. Please don't send the Ninja squad to my home. :brokenheart:

Listen to Sharkeeper's advice; he's helped me out as well as many other SCSI-needy people. He's knows SCSI like Mario Andretti knows race cars.

 

[sharkeeper]

Are you looking for best STR in long reads and writes?

If so, turn OFF all caches. Turn them ON if your read/writes are shorter or mixed. With this many drives and using the cache I recommend 256MB. Ask tech support for a unreleased firmware that supports 512MB if you desire.

What program are you using to bench your arrays?

Cheers!

 

[istolyar]

Basically we just try to copy 100mb file and monitoring time.
It will be great if you can suggest any benchmark utility

 

[istolyar]

Any Ideas

 

[Steve]

http://www.jhps.net/files/diagnose/h2bench.zip

H2bench runs under DOS and directly accesses the hard disk via BIOS. In order to achieve correct results, i.e for comparison with ours, you have to boot DOS without any cache programs, using only those drivers which are absolutely necessary. If you are using a SCSI adapter from NCR or Symbios Logic and an SDMS BIOS version 3, you need the driver Doscam.sys -- otherwise the disks can only be operated in the slower asynchronous mode of the SCSI bus.

Run "h2bench -e -c 0 0" (without quotes) for a raw max throughput test.

 

[sharkeeper]

Raw throughput and file copy performance are two entirely different things. Are you copying to and from locations on the same physical disk or do you have another physical disk/array/logical disk as a target? No SATA/IDE drive can sustain more than 65MB/S continuously so if you read/write to it that should be considered.

Cheers!