I recently (last night) installed OpenBSD-5.4-amd64 on an HP-Proliant
ML370-G4 that has a Smart Array 6404 controller card in a 64-bit,
133-MHz PCI-X slot. It has two Ultra320 SCSI channels and 192MB of RAM
cache. One SCSI channel is connected to two 146GB U320 10kRPM drives
which are configured as a RAID0 array. The Smart Array card presents the
RAID0 as one SCSI device: /dev/sd0.
[dmesg]: http://pastebin.com/Sxs801ef
[pcidump]: http://pastebin.com/P5Zn1xM4
[sysctl]: http://pastebin.com/kmXeMZ02
[acpidump]: http://pastebin.com/xufZXdha "acpi.headers only"
Disk performance is *very* bad. For example:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1k count=32768
32768+0 records in
32768+0 records out
33554432 bytes transferred in 6.325 secs (5304659 bytes/sec)
I tinkered with FreeBSD9.2 and CentOS6.4 on this hardware and they both
transfer about 300M to 400M bytes/sec with that command. Large transfers
(>GB) write about 80M to 100M bytes/sec (if I remember correctly).
I am preparing to recompile the system to 5.4-stable so there is an
opportunity to make some tweaks to the default kernel configuration
(maybe the SCSIDEBUG option) but I am very open to suggestions on how to
proceed.
I plan to add four more 146GB U320 10kRPM drives, place them on the
second Ultra320 SCSI channel, and configure them as a RAID5 array. I
intend to run OpenBSD on this machine for the foreseeable future so
getting the RAID hardware configured for maximum utilization,
performance, and reliability is of utmost importance. Any RAID hardware
gurus willing to point me in the right direction will be much
appreciated. Actually, *any* suggestions could potentially be useful.
I'm rather stuck at the moment.
