WD Raptor/SATA with RAID0 way to slow

From: Julien Oster (lkml_at_mc.frodoid.org)
Date: 10/31/03

  • Next message: Pavel Machek: "Re: Announce: Swsusp-2.0-2.6-alpha1 [warning: eats disks with loop!]"
    To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
    Date:	Fri, 31 Oct 2003 03:49:10 +0100
    
    

    Hello,

    I recently purchased an Asus A7N8X mainboard with the Silicon Imaging
    SATA controller online and two Western Digital Raptor SATA harddrives
    with 10krpm.

    Those harddisks are supposed to be "really fast", but I don't really
    get the performance out of them. In fact, I get much less performance
    than with my "standard consumer" IBM DeskStars.

    Besides the WD Raptors, I have two IBM DeskStars (normal PATA). The
    two IBM deskstars and the two WD Raptors are bundled to linux
    softraids with RAID level 0 each.

    I use the same hdparm command line for all drives during boot, which
    is:

    hdparm -c 1 -m 16 -S 241 -u 1 -k 1 -K 1

    I first used a simple hdparm -t on the harddisks individually to see
    how they perform alone. Here's the values I got for one of the IBMs:

    IBM DeskStar
     Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.41 seconds = 45.39 MB/sec

    And now for the Raptors:
    WD Raptor
     Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.24 seconds = 51.61 MB/sec

    Well, at least it's faster. But the next test is really annoying me. I
    did the same hdparm -t on the RAID0 containing the IBMs (/dev/md5) and
    the one containing the Raptors (/dev/md6) and got the following
    result:

    /dev/md5:
     Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 0.71 seconds = 90.14 MB/sec

    /dev/md6:
     Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.06 seconds = 60.38 MB/sec

    For the IBMs, the value is fine, it's nearly double the throughput
    than with a single drive. But for the Raptor RAID, it's even less than
    for the IBM RAID! It doesn't even come close to doubling the
    throughput, which is the fact for the IBM drives.

    Another quick test with bonnie++ showed that the Raptor RAID really is
    slower then the IBM RAID. Not much, but it is - and that despite the
    fact that it should be much faster. The Raptors have a very low avg
    read seek time of 4.5ms while the IBMs do have 9.8ms, so I expected at
    least the filesystem test with bonnie++ to show some performance
    improvement, when doing things like creating and deleting files, but
    absolutely no test didn't gave a lower performance for the Raptors.

    Any idea of what could be wrong? This really annoys me, because I
    purchased the smaller Raptors just because I need something as fast as
    possible, due to the extensive data amounts I'm working it (and SCSI
    not being an option for my development machine at home).

    Thanks in advance,
    Julien
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  • Next message: Pavel Machek: "Re: Announce: Swsusp-2.0-2.6-alpha1 [warning: eats disks with loop!]"

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