Re: Areca 1260 Performance (was: File Systems Compared)

On 6-Dec-06, at 2:47 PM, Brian Wipf wrote:

>> Hmmm.   Something is not right.  With a 16 HD RAID 10 based on 10K  
>> rpm HDs, you should be seeing higher absolute performance numbers.
>>
>> Find out what HW the Areca guys and Tweakers guys used to test the  
>> 1280s.
>> At LW2006, Areca was demonstrating all-in-cache reads and writes  
>> of ~1600MBps and ~1300MBps respectively along with RAID 0  
>> Sustained Rates of ~900MBps read, and ~850MBps write.
>>
>> Luke, I know you've managed to get higher IO rates than this with  
>> this class of HW.  Is there a OS or SW config issue Brian should  
>> closely investigate?
>
> I wrote 1280 by a mistake. It's actually a 1260. Sorry about that.  
> The IOP341 class of cards weren't available when we ordered the  
> parts for the box, so we had to go with the 1260. The box(es) we  
> build next month will either have the 1261ML or 1280 depending on  
> whether we go 16 or 24 disk.
>
> I noticed Bucky got almost 800 random seeks per second on her 6  
> disk 10000 RPM SAS drive Dell PowerEdge 2950. The random seek  
> performance of this box disappointed me the most. Even running 2  
> concurrent bonnies, the random seek performance only increased from  
> 644 seeks/sec to 813 seeks/sec. Maybe there is some setting I'm  
> missing? This card looked pretty impressive on tweakers.net.

Areca has some performance numbers in a downloadable PDF for the  
Areca ARC-1120, which is in the same class as the ARC-1260, except  
with 8 ports. With all 8 drives in a RAID 0 the card gets the  
following performance numbers:

Card         single thread write    20 thread write      single  
thread read        20 thread read
ARC-1120     321.26 MB/s            404.76 MB/s          412.55 MB/ 
s               672.45 MB/s

My numbers for sequential i/o for the ARC-1260 in a 16 disk RAID 10  
are slightly better than the ARC-1120 in an 8 disk RAID 0 for a  
single thread. I guess this means my numbers are reasonable.