Still benching.... trying to find an optimisation of stripe size for long sequential writes (the only thing i care about for this server). So far i've got around 145MB/sec write... which for a 3 disk RAID5 is pretty damned good. Access time has suffered at around 15ms... but again, not a concern, as large sequential reads and writes are priority one. I have no problem with VNC stuff.. it's working fantastically now.
Not yet. That will be last thing once all data is across, and a back up made. I will sping down the disks.. sleep after a certain period, and configure WOL, yes. I'm having trouble finding how to spin down the disks in the LSI literature however... Wait until you pay your own bills... you won't think so then Anyhow... pics. Goodies! Motherboard mounted in case. LSI RAID card. Nice tidy build However.... this £15 case has the worst cooling in the world ever! Hard drives were alsmot hot to the touch after 30 minutes! So... out of retirement comes the venerable PC-71!! How lost does this mobo look in this case??? Ironically... it's too big for a neat build... as the mobo is too far away from the drives to route them behind the board LOL I've spent ages configuring it to have teh best large file write performance I can manage... and with a 3 disk RAID5, that's a hard task. With 4 disks it becomes more realistic, but I've spent enough LOL. Having said that... None too shabby. Read performance has suffered as a result of my choice of stripe size and read ahead optimisation, but still manges more than the network can deliver, so not fussed about that. Access times have suffered as a result of stripe size, which I've chosen to give the best large files sustained write times. Set to a smaller stripe size with read ahead on adaptive, it drops to around 10ms. As it is however, it's not important to me, as I need fast write transfer speeds of large contiguous files (Norton Ghost back up and transferring large image and video files). I never took any screenies of RAID0... and I'm not rebuilding my RAID again to do that, but if anyone is thinking of building a RAID0 config, I can recommend this card. I was seeing around 370MB/sec max, and 295MB/sec min read rates in 0. That 400 is not burst either... that's the max sustained rate. Wasted on a file server over a Gb network though. So... all in all.. I'm happy. PC Tools seems to slow down my transfer rates over the network however. Without it, I get around 110MB/sec on large files transfer, but with it, around 90MB/sec. Once all updates are on, I'll disable internet access to it anyway... so I may remove PC Tools. [edit] 102 watts at the mains socket with all disks spinning and processor idle (which will be it's normal state 80% of the time). No power figures in uber power saving mode yet, as I've not configured them.
Well... yeah, it crossed my mind. The card is doing most of the work, so I might. Realistically though, how much will it save? I've had experience of instability with underclocks just as much as over.
nice results those speeds match my own experience I'm gonna try to upgrade my gigabit switch tho... the only thing that's different on my server is the CPU power (Phenom II X3 720BE @ 3400Mhz) since I run heavy-load bioinformatics stuff on the server never measured the power it uses tho... P.S. lol the hugeness of that case xD
pooky i know its an odd question/idea But that RAID card is going to get hammered a lot right, and its got the smallest heatsink that i have ever seen! During your backups can you burn you're finger on that heatsink? Time to mod it!!
I've been hammering it for hours while transferring all the data over.... and it was HHHot! So I dug out a Coolermaster 120mm fan, and slapped it in a spare TRUE fan holder.. so it has little legs to stand on, and installed it facing up directly under the card. Just mildly warm to the touch now
