Speeding up writes?

Snarkout · 2006-10-05 20:26:28

I'm trying to figure out the best solution to my current problem - my 3ware raid-5 set sucks. Doing even moderate writes to it absolutely kills my desktop. For example, scping an iso from one box to this box = go make a sammich. I've uptaed the firmware, and have done the things I've had 3ware recommend short of switching this disk to xfs - right now it's ext3. But they insisted that my issues would go away once I got the card into a pci-x slot (it was in a regular pci slot so it made sense) - no dice. I upgraded from an athlon 3200+ to a pentium D 955 and a supermicro mobo, and writes are still *just* as damaging to system performance. I've read this

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=12865

but as far as I can tell, this is mostly useful for speeding up reads, not writes. I've also tried both the ck kernel and the beyond kernel, and neither of them seem to help much in this case.

Ideas I've had are to just buy another drive, somehow migrate my current install over to it, and keep my raid set as a storage volume. I don't care much about moving files *quickly* from machine to machine, but I do want to be able to do it w/o having to ignore my computer for 10 min (or longer for multi-gig files).

Ideas or suggestions?

Snarkout · 2006-10-05 20:34:37

FWIW, the set is 4 120 gig sata drives on a 3ware 9500s card.

[root@pinkwater bonnie]# hdparm -Tt /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 4460 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2230.97 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 422 MB in 3.00 seconds = 140.50 MB/sec

And a dump of bonnie++ output:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
pinkwater        2G  4466   8  4399   1  2863   0 36998  63 114032  10 227.3   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  3169  82 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  3246  82 +++++ +++ 11929  98
pinkwater,2G,4466,8,4399,1,2863,0,36998,63,114032,10,227.3,0,16,3169,82,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,3246,82,+++++,+++,11929,98

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-05 20:26:28

Speeding up writes?

#2 2006-10-05 20:34:37

Re: Speeding up writes?

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