William Warren wrote:
Stewart Williams wrote:
I have just purchased an HP ProLiant HP ML110 G5 server and install ed CentOS 5.2 x86_64 on it.
It has the following spec:
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3065 @ 2.33GHz 4GB ECC memory 4 x 250GB SATA hard disks running at 1.5GB/s
Onboard RAID controller is enabled but at the moment I have used mdadm to configure the array.
RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 SATA RAID Controller
For a simple striped array I ran:
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 # mke2fs -j /dev/md0 # mount -t ext3 /dev/md0 /mnt
Attached are the results of 2 bonnie++ tests I made to test the performance:
# bonnie++ -s 256m -d /mnt -u 0 -r 0
and
# bonnie++ -s 1g -d /mnt -u 0 -r 0
I also tried 3 of the drives in a RAID 5 setup with gave similar results.
Is it me or are the results poor?
Is this the best I can expect from the hardware or is something wrong?
I would appreciate any advice or possible tweaks I can make to the system to make the performance better.
The block I/O is the thing that concerns me as mostly I am serving a 650MB file via samba to 5 clients and I think this is where I need the speed.
Plus I am hoping to run some virtualised guests on it eventually, but nothing too heavy.
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
That onbard raid is fakeraid..so when you dialup raid 5 you effectivly put hte hdd's in pio mode since ALL data has to be routed through your cpu. Please get a raid card from HP or go get a 3ware card so you ahve real hardware raid.
fake and real raid chpsets: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html
Why using fakeraid at all is bad: http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/09/fake-raid-fraid-sucks-even-more-at.html
MDM under linux is kernel raid that does not use a binary driver..however you don't want to do ANY software raid 5.
Thanks William,
I am no expert on RAID, so you have opened my eyes to somethings I wasn't aware of.
I am considering disabling the onboard RAID in the BIOS and re-installing CentOS and configuring the 4 drives as RAID 10 just to see what the performance is like.
Or I may purchase a card as you advise. Would I benefit from buying a SCSI/or SAS card and drives for my requirements? Basically the main role of the machine is to serve a ~600MB file via samba to 5 Windows XP cient PC's on a gigabit network.
Stewart