I posted this on the forums in June and never got any response, so I
figured I'd try again here; it looks like the lists get a good amount
of traffic.

I have a file server with 8 SATA drives formatted with ZFS RAIDZ2. I'm
using Linux as the host because it's the only OS that I can find that
properly handled the jmicron controller on the motherboard. Under
Linux, I can get raw write speeds of 105MB/s to each of the 8 hard
drives simultaneously. Using the linux zfs implementation
(zfs-on-fuse), I can get reads of 100MB/s and writes of 250MB/s.
That's not bad, but it's pretty bad compared with the raw capability
of the drives, so I thought I'd try OpenSolaris under VirtualBox.

I set up the virtual image using a virtual SCSI controller, mapping
each of the raw drives to SCSI IDs 0-6 and 8 (a drive with ID 7 is
never seen by OpenSolaris). I did a zfs import to bring the pool
online, and I ran a simple dd test. My write and read speeds are under
30 MB/s. I've tried using the virtual SATA controller (from VirtualBox
bin), but it just freezes after about 100MB of data written, so I
can't get a good assessment of the performance there. Can anybody
recommend any performance tips for IO, give any ideas of what to look
for, etc? I did notice that the .vmdk for all the raw drives says the
interface is ide. Could that be a problem? Any ideas at all would be
most appreciated.

System:
Linux 2.6.29, cfq scheduler
8 GB RAM
Phenom II X4 processor (AM3)
OS drive - 80GB mirrored
Storage drives: 8x 1TB, raw speeds >100MB/s

Any other details can easily be provided, if anyone can think of
anything that would be helpful.

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