chrism@imntv.com wrote:

Kirk Bocek wrote:

...

I saw a definite improvement by turning off NCQ and setting StorSave to 'Balanced.' Are these 1.5GB/Sec or 3.0GB/Sec SATA drives? During my testing I changed from non-interleaved memory and 1.5GB to interleaved and 3.0GB. Made a big difference in bonnie++ results. Unfortunately, I can't say which was more important.

If you have the patience, read through my recent (but lengthy) thread on the 3Ware 9550 titled "Calling All FS Fanatics." There's a lot of good info from many helpful people. I've only gotten full performance using JFS or XFS.

I'm doing this from memory as the machine is at another location now. I think I did this:

turned off ncq (per Josh's suggestion)

Tried that, it made a small improvement (see my previous post).

turned on write caching (it's on an oversized ups and the data isn't critical)

Write caching is on. I've got a BBU, so the data is protected.

set storsave to "performance"

I prefer to leave this one as is to take advantage of the write journaling.

changed the memory interleave (thanks to kirk's suggestion). It was off by default.

This one I would like to try. Can you tell me where I can make the change?

used parted to create gpt disklabel

What is the advantage of gpt over msdos? Can I make this change without recreating the filesystem?

set noatime and one other option that was suggested here for the RAID partition

Anyone know if noatime is recommended for a filesystem containing an Oracle database?

What was the other option?

used mke2fs -j -b 4096 /dev/blah

I used 'mkfs.ext3 /dev/blah'. It created 4K blocks.

That was it.

Also, I tried the same array as a RAID0 device on the same box and the performance was approximately the same (maybe ever so slightly faster).

Raid0 should be faster, particularly with writes since it doesn't have to calculate parity.