Hi,
On Wed, 14 Apr 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 1999 at 02:55:21PM +0100, Piete Brooks wrote:
> > I'm a fan of SW RAID (a motherboard with 3 LVD busses, 2 EIDE busses,
> and 1 W > bus kind of satisfies our disk IO requirements), but I've
> being pressured to > buy some HW RAID for our "main" NFS servers.
> What do you need the lower performance for ? :)
> Seriously, if anyone can submit a benchmark (bonnie & hdparm -t, or
> others of your choices), that shows a HW RAID that runs faster than SW
> RAID, on the same disks, CPU, memory, board, etc, I'd be very happy to
> see it.
> I've seen a few examples on this list that showed SW RAID running
> several _times_ faster than HW RAID. But I have yet to see HW running
> faster than SW.
> I'm sure it can be done. But I'd like to see it.
It happens I'm going to have the chance of doing this kind of
tests. Please post what kind of tests (apart from bonnie) would you like
to see, different raid levels, setups, etc.
I'm going to set up a machine with RH 5.2 and 2.2.5 with raidtools
0.90 and appropiate kernel patch (I merged the 2.2.3 one to be applied
to a 2.2.5).
Here's the configuration of the testbed machine (SMP) I'll setup:
Asus P2B-DS (Dual mb with integrated AIC-7890 Ultra 2 SCSI)
2x PII 400
2x 128 PC100 non-ECC DIMMs
Kingston KNE-100TX nic.
I think this is a pretty affordable production machine, so no one
could say later that it was built in order to enhance sw raid.
System will be on a non-raid partition of a "system disk" hooked to the UW
bus, easing swaping raids for testing.
The hw raid will be a Mylex DACPGM-2-8E with external cabinet.
I'll have 8 4,5 Gb U2W discs and 2 9,1GB U2W discs.
Of course, these aren't for me :) I only will have everything for
a couple of days, that's we'd better have all the tests in a schedule
list.
I hope to build a fair and serious comparison table between sw/hw
raid with the help of the list, including both "raw" benchs (eg. bonnie,
iozone) and application tests (i.e., nfs, etc...) but i'll need the
collaboration and suggestions of all people interested.
Greetings,
*****---(*)---**********************************************---------->
Francisco J. Montilla Systems & Network administrator
[EMAIL PROTECTED] irc: pukka Seville Spain
INSFLUG (LiNUX) Coordinator. www.insflug.org - ftp.insflug.org
