Hey all -
Just spent quite some time trying to work out why my 2 disk mirrored ZFS
pool was running so slow, and found an interesting answer...
System: new Gigabyte M750sli-DS4, AMD 9550, 4GB memory and 2 X Seagate
500GB SATA-II 32mb cache disks.
The SATA ports on the nfoce 750asli chipset don't yet seem to be
supported by the nv_sata driver (I'm only running nv_89 at the mo,
though I'm not aware of new support going in just yet). I *can* get the
driver to attach, but not to see any disks. interesting, but I digress...
Anyhoo, - I'm stuck in IDE compatability mode for the moment.
So - using plain dd to the zfs filesystem on said disk
dd if=/dev/zero of=delete.me bs=65536
I could achieve only about 35-40MB/s write speed, whereas, if I dd to
the slice directly, I can get around 90-95MB/s
I tried using whole disks versus a slice and it made no appreciable
difference.
It turns out that when you are in IDE compatability mode, having two
disks on the same 'controller' (c# in solaris) behaves just like real
IDE... Crap!
Moving the second disk onto from c1 to c2 got be back to at least 50MB/s
with higher peaks, up to 60/70MB/s.
Also of note, on the gigabyte board (and I guess other nforce 750asli
based chipsets) only 4 of the 6 SATA ports work when in IDE mode.
Other thoughts on the Nforce 750a:
- nge plumbs up OK and can send and 'see' packets, but does not seem
to know itself... In promiscuous mode, you can see returning icmp echo
requests, but they don't make it to the top of the stack.
I had to use an e1000g in a PCI slot to get my networking working
properly...
- Onboard Video works, including compiz, but you need to create an
xorg.conf and update the nvidia driver with the latest from the nvidia
website
Seems snappy enough. With 4 cores @ 2.2Ghz (phenom 9550) it's looking
like it'll do what I wanted quite nicely.
Later...
Nathan.
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