I've just noticed that 3Ware has a more current version of the firmware for the 9500S than I have on several machines. All of mine are running:
3w-9xxx: scsi0: Firmware FE9X 3.04.00.005, BIOS BE9X 3.04.00.002, Ports: 8.
and the latest rev appears to be 3.08. I'm wondering if there is any compelling reason to upgrade or just let these sleeping dogs lie. :) Any sage (or other) advice would be much appreciated.
Best,
Chris Mauritz wrote:
I've just noticed that 3Ware has a more current version of the firmware for the 9500S than I have on several machines. All of mine are running:
3w-9xxx: scsi0: Firmware FE9X 3.04.00.005, BIOS BE9X 3.04.00.002, Ports: 8.
and the latest rev appears to be 3.08. I'm wondering if there is any compelling reason to upgrade or just let these sleeping dogs lie. :) Any sage (or other) advice would be much appreciated.
Since nobody else responded... :)
I threw caution to the wind and updated my firmware (turns out the machines were using 9550SX controllers, not 9500) from 3.04 to 3.08 on a couple of production CentOS 4 and my test CentOS 5 machines. EXT3 performance seems to have improved noticeably on the RAID 0 devices I tested so it might be worth the update.
Best,
Chris Mauritz wrote:
I threw caution to the wind and updated my firmware (turns out the machines were using 9550SX controllers, not 9500) from 3.04 to 3.08 on a couple of production CentOS 4 and my test CentOS 5 machines. EXT3 performance seems to have improved noticeably on the RAID 0 devices I tested so it might be worth the update.
Some numbers would be good... like bonnie++ results, and some feedback as to what the config of your raid setup is like.
Karanbir Singh wrote:
Chris Mauritz wrote:
I threw caution to the wind and updated my firmware (turns out the machines were using 9550SX controllers, not 9500) from 3.04 to 3.08 on a couple of production CentOS 4 and my test CentOS 5 machines. EXT3 performance seems to have improved noticeably on the RAID 0 devices I tested so it might be worth the update.
Some numbers would be good... like bonnie++ results, and some feedback as to what the config of your raid setup is like.
Sorry, I'm not at the office anymore. The configuration of my test CentOS 5 machine looks like this:
Dual Opteron 270 (4 cores total) 2gig RAM OS on a standalone 80gig SATA disk 3Ware 9550SX with 8 x 500gig Seagate 7200rpm SATA drives (firmware is now 3.0.8.00.016)
The RAID device is configured as a large RAID0 device (it's mostly scratch uncompressed video and other temporary data) and is formatted as an EXT3 filesystem. According to bonnie++ (with a data set of 4GB), I was seeing writes around 325mb/sec and reads around 430mb/sec.
Best,
Chris Mauritz wrote:
Dual Opteron 270 (4 cores total) 2gig RAM OS on a standalone 80gig SATA disk 3Ware 9550SX with 8 x 500gig Seagate 7200rpm SATA drives (firmware is now 3.0.8.00.016)
The RAID device is configured as a large RAID0 device (it's mostly scratch uncompressed video and other temporary data) and is formatted as an EXT3 filesystem. According to bonnie++ (with a data set of 4GB), I was seeing writes around 325mb/sec and reads around 430mb/sec.
quite nice! Think I might go around and upgrade a few of our machines too then :)
thanks
-
Chris Mauritz -
Karanbir Singh