[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

Wed Oct 4 15:44:39 UTC 2006
Dan Stoner <dstoner at flmnh.ufl.edu>

> Makes one wonder if Linux is reasonably usable with 3ware. ;-)
> 
> Does anyone have any bonnie++ results for Linux software RAID 5?  I know
> software RAID 5 does not really lend itself to a performant software
> implementation, but the results would be interesting to see, none the
> less.


I don't have any hard numbers, but one of my colleagues just doesn't use 
the 3Ware hardware RAID features because of the performance issues, 
building his RAID 5 (or possibly RAID 6) arrays in software. 
Performance screams (=fast).


Back to the filesystem discussion...
A bit far-fetched, but I wonder if the really bad (comparably) ext3 
performance could be caused by an unusual interaction between the ext3 
code and the 3Ware driver that happens to makes writes suck worse when 
using ext3 on the 3Ware adapters... like ext3 writes ALWAYS fall into 
some non-optimal driver code path.

- Dan