Pathetic write performance from Areca PCIe cards

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I have two systems with a serious I/O subsystem based on Areca PCIe cards, but the results I am getting from simple write benchmarks are extremely slow.

The details are two 64-bit Opteron systems, one with an Areca PCIe 1210 and the other a PCIe 1220 and both with Seagate SATA II 750 GB drives. The motherboard is a Tyan S2891 (Thunder K8SRE). The 120 system has 1 GB of PC2700 RAM and the 1220 system has 2GB of PC3200 RAM. The Areca BIOS on both cards is version 1.17a and the firmware is 1.41. I have tried two different kernels, 2.6.17 from Ubuntu, which had the Areca driver added by Ubuntu and 2.6.18 from Gentoo with the Areca driver added manually from 2.6.19-rc3.

In the initial tests, both computers had a RAID 5/6 configuration, but to confirm the result, I setup a single Seagate as a pass-through drive and had the same results. The drive was set to SATA II with NCQ and the cache was enabled to write-back.

dd if=/dev/zero of=output oflag=sync bs=100M count=1 gives an excellent result, around 188 MB/sec. dd if=/dev/zero of=output oflag=sync bs=200M count=1 gives an excellent result, around 167 MB/sec. dd if=/dev/zero of=output oflag=sync bs=300M count=1 gives an OK result, around 117 MB/sec. dd if=/dev/zero of=output oflag=sync bs=400M count=1 gives a very poor result, around 35 MB/sec.
These very low numbers around 30 MB/sec persist as I increase the bs number.

As I continue to run the tests, the bs that gives a poor results goes down to about 200 MB. The results are from the system with the 1220 card. The system with 1210 gives slightly lower numbers overall.

I have also confirmed these low numbers using a benchmark called dm from the network RAID package, drbd.

Reading from the drives (based on hdparm -tT testing) gives excellent results.

When I use the drive directly connected to the SATA on the motherboard, all the write tests hover around 56 MB/second regardless of bs value.

Since both systems are affected, my guess is there is bug in the Areca driver or with the cards themselves.
--

Maurice Volaski, [email protected]
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University
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