Re: Performance Characteristics of All Linux RAIDs (mdadm/bonnie++)

From: Chris Snook
Date: Wed May 28 2008 - 11:40:49 EST


Justin Piszcz wrote:
Hardware:

1. Utilized (6) 400 gigabyte sata hard drives.
2. Everything is on PCI-e (965 chipset & a 2port sata card)

Used the following 'optimizations' for all tests.

# Set read-ahead.
echo "Setting read-ahead to 64 MiB for /dev/md3"
blockdev --setra 65536 /dev/md3

# Set stripe-cache_size for RAID5.
echo "Setting stripe_cache_size to 16 MiB for /dev/md3"
echo 16384 > /sys/block/md3/md/stripe_cache_size

# Disable NCQ on all disks.
echo "Disabling NCQ on all disks..."
for i in $DISKS
do
echo "Disabling NCQ on $i"
echo 1 > /sys/block/"$i"/device/queue_depth
done

Given that one of the greatest benefits of NCQ/TCQ is with parity RAID, I'd be fascinated to see how enabling NCQ changes your results. Of course, you'd want to use a single SATA controller with a known good NCQ implementation, and hard drives known to not do stupid things like disable readahead when NCQ is enabled.

-- Chris
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