For what its worth, we recently built an 8 ide drive 280GB raid5 system.
Benchmarking with HDBENCH we got 35.7MB/sec read and 29.87MB/sec write. With
DBENCH and 1 client we got 44.5 MB/sec with 3 clients it dropped down to about
43MB/sec.
The system is a 600Mhz P-3 on a ASUS P3C2000 with 256MB of ram, the raid drives
are 40GB Maxtor DMA66, 7200 RPM, and each is run as master on its own channel.
Turning on DMA seems to be the key. Benchmarking the individual drives with
HDBENCH we got numbers like 2.57MB/sec read and 3.27MB/sec write with DMA off
and it jumped up to 24.7MB/sec read and 24.2MB/sec write with it on.
That, and enough processing power to see that paritity calc is not a
bottleneck.
--
Clay J. Claiborne, Jr., President
Cosmos Engineering Company
1550 South Dunsmuir Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90019
(323) 930-2540 (323) 930-1393 Fax
http:www.CosmosEng.com
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
