AMD SB950 vs ICH10, ZFS

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tangoseal

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I have a simple question....

No matter what software I run whether it be NAS4FREE or FREENAS both using ZFS v28 it seems that my ZFS performance is slower on the AMD SB950 chipset than it is on any intel ICH10 chipset.

Can anyone give me an idea why this might be?

I am using an AMD 990FX/SB950 FX6100 motherboard and 3x WD RED 2TB drives.

I know the drives arent this slow. They individually benchmark at over 110MB/s transfers across various suites.

During transfer test using ZFS raidz1 4K sectors and no compression no dedup I am getting avg transfer rates to and from the array at a whopping 66-70MB/s.

Here is the kicker.... the server is on 10G ethernet so bandwidth is NOT an issue.

The PC in my sig below, waiting on my 10g card to arrive from ebay, is on an Intel 1gb NIC. Switch below in sig. Switching and networking is not an issue.

The test server as it stands now, has 4GB of ECC ram. During transfers the ram consumption is only 33%. I am not going to throw 32GB of RAM at this thing if it is going to perform poorly on 4gb. I do not think that ram is even the issue until I see more of it being used and performance sucking.

I am curious if my performance hit is due to the AMD south bridge performance? I am ready to kick this thing in the nuts and just order an Intel C200 series chipset and xeon based solution to build this backup NAS with.
 
I'm seeing 70-80Mbyte/s on my old C2D using 4 HDDs (500Gb) or a 4 HDD (1TB) RAID-Z array so in that case I think Samba is the limiting factor per session. Local benchmarks show roughly 120Mbyte/s.
FreeBSD 9-STABLE, IBM M1015 controller card.
//Danne
 
From what I've read, despite AMD having 6 SATA6 ports, their SATA6 ports are generally slower than Intel's SATA6 ports. AMD's southbridge is in general inferior to that of Intel's.
 
Is that quit fuckin tryin lol....
Click to expand...
:)

There's a reason why everyone uses an Intel board when testing drives. ;)

AMD also gimps AHCI probably because they don't want to pay licensing fees to Intel.
 
AMD's south bridge lags behind Intel's in a lot of ways. Transfer rates being one of the main areas they falter in. I've seen Intel's SATA II 3Gb/s ports perform pretty close to AMD's SATA III 6Gb/s in some tests. Sometimes they perform better. AMD's OROM / RAID BIOS is also pretty shitty. In addition to the interface being pretty bad the thing only allows for stripe sizes of 64k and 128k. Intel will let you do 8k-256k stripe sizes. So you have a lot more flexibility there.
 
Dan_D said:
AMD's south bridge lags behind Intel's in a lot of ways. Transfer rates being one of the main areas they falter in. I've seen Intel's SATA II 3Gb/s ports perform pretty close to AMD's SATA III 6Gb/s in some tests. Sometimes they perform better. AMD's OROM / RAID BIOS is also pretty shitty. In addition to the interface being pretty bad the thing only allows for stripe sizes of 64k and 128k. Intel will let you do 8k-256k stripe sizes. So you have a lot more flexibility there.
Click to expand...

This confirms my suspicions thank you.
 
tangoseal said:
This confirms my suspicions thank you.
Click to expand...

Now managing disks through software in Windows or Linux using a pure software solution may enable you to use stripe sizes in a RAID array that the onboard firmware never would. In such cases I have no idea how they would perform but I'd suspect it won't be good.
 
Make sure you are not using the JMicron Controller it's half as slow as anything out there. While the SB950 will be slower than the ICH10 it shouldn't be so noticeable that you are screaming out for help. I'm seeing about a 25MB/s disadvantage.

Here a test that TR did.
 
Jmicron is disabled.

I will post some numbers shortly... just got home.

I am definitely too tired to follow this thread I started tonight with more information. I will post a screenshot of my Iperf testing...

this is from my server, best part in it is my 10g etherent to my Signature rig below. My second 10g card will be here this week so I will have a full 10g to 10g link speed between boxes. I have a 30 TB Xeon socket 2011 NAS that absolutely CRUSHES stuff but it very expensive. I am building a cheaper and far less powerful secondary NAS for backing up my absolutely dire important files. The 10g nic in this test server is really for fun and testing to see if AMD is just that slow.

Here is a screenshot so far and I am going to bed. Basically showing that network throughput is not an issue for me. I am seriously ready to think AMD is just slow and going to build an I3 ECC / C202'ish build. I am smoked....sleep time.

captureqfd.jpg
 
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