On Fri, 6 Jan 2006 at 3:42pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote
You can play with the kernel buffer settings. It's highly recommended for many of the 3Ware Escalade cards, including the 9000 series.
But if performance is a consideration, do _not_ use RAID-5 on the 3Ware Escalade 7000/8000. Use RAID-10. You can break over 200MBps _writes_ with RAID-10 on the 7000/8000 series.
Wanting to get back to using hardware RAID on my 3wares without taking the crushing RAID5/ext3 performance hit, I took this advice and swapped out all 16 160GB drives in one of my servers for brand new 320GB drives. I configured both cards (7500-8s) in RAID-10 mode with 128KB stripe size. bonnie++ on 1 card only managed about 60 MB/s writing (and 165 MB/s reading). That's with 'blockdev --setra 16384' on the device. A software RAID0 stripe across the 2 arrays managed 90MB/s writes and 300MB/s reads.
What tricks do you have to pull to get the 200MB/s you quote above?