Hi everyone, I've bought some new hardware a couple of weeks ago to replace my home fileserver: Intel DG33TL motherboard with Intel gigabit nic and ICH9R Intel Pentium Dual E2160 (= 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo 64-bit architecture with less cache, cheap, cool and more than fast enough) 2 x 1 GB DDR2 RAM 3 x Seagate 7200.11 750GB SATA drives
Originally I was going to keep running Windows 2003 for a month (to finish migrating some data files to an open-source friendly format) and then move to Solaris, but because the Intel Matrix RAID 5 write speeds were abysmally low no matter which stripe sizes/NTFS allocation unit size I selected, I've already thrown out W2K3 completely in favor of Solaris 10 u5. I have updated the motherboard with the latest Intel BIOS (0413 3/6/2008). I have loaded "optimal defaults" and have put the SATA drives in AHCI mode. At the moment I'm seeing read speeds of 200MB/s on a ZFS raidz filesystem consisting of c1t0d0s3, c1t1d0 and c1t2d0 (I'm booting from a small 700MB slice on the first sata drive; c1t0d0s3 is about 690 "real" gigabytes large and ZFS just uses the same amount of sectors on the other disks and leaves the rest untouched). As a single drive should top out at about 104MB/s for sequential access in the outer tracks, I'm very pleased with that. But the write speeds I'm getting are still far below my expectations: about 20MB/s (versus 14MB/s in Windows 2003 with Intel RAID driver). I was hoping for at least 100MB/s, maybe even more. I'm doing simple dd read and write tests (with /dev/zero, /dev/null etc) using blocksizes like 16384 and 65536. Shouldn't write speed be substantially higher? If I monitor using "vmstat 1", I see that cpu usage never exceeds 3% during writes (!), and 10% during reads. I'm a Solaris newbie (but with the intention of learning a whole lot), so I may have overlooked something. I also don't really know where to start looking for bottlenecks. Thanks! This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
