Hi,
We have a KZPSC (3 channel PCI RAID) card in our AS 1000A 5/500. Time
came to replace our old Elite-9 drives with the new Cheetah drives to
boost performance. Everything *seemed* to work fine. Then we did
some speed tests. We were expecting close to saturation speeds from
the drives as the controller has 10 MHz wide channels and I tested
the drives to perform better than 20M/s on a different system. Insted,
we measured slightly under 10M/s or so. The suspicion was that the SCSI
channels were doing either 5MHz or narrow transfers. We went through
the performance history of the server, and it *seems* that it *never*
did 10 MHz transfers (at one point it did have narrow drives attached).
We just never realized because the numbers 'made sense' considering the
performance of the drives we used at that time.
Is there any way to confirm this and 'fix' the problem?
I did upgrade the firmware of the card (no change). Using the new
config utility (ra200rcu) I set every bus to 10 MHz, queue disabled (if
I enabled it, the performance dropped slightly). The cheetah is the
only drive on the channel so it is not some other drive pulling down the
bus. According to Seagate, the drive will negotiate whatever speeds
the controller can do, up to Ultra-wide-LVD.
If we have to abandon the current controller, can anyone suggest
an apropriate replacement? We are mostly interested in raid-0 type
performance (beyond 50M/s sustained I/O is the goal). I would hate
to switch to Intel/Linux if I don't have to.
Gyula
Received on Wed Jun 30 1999 - 11:51:57 NZST