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 at 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.