Slow Areca Read Speeds

[Fryguy8]

I'm running an Areca 1220 on a FreeBSD machine with 2 arrays on it

4x seagate 320gb in raid5
4x samsung 750gb in raid5

The machine is a s939 dual core (3800+) with a gig of ram.

Firmware version V1.43 2007-4-17
Doing a read test on the arrays (using bonnie++) is only yielding about 90MB/s read speeds, which seems awfully low for what it could be. CPU/memory usage don't seem to be the bottlenecks, so I'm unsure where the problem is.

Here are some screenshots of the config (ignore the checking state, I started that up after the benchmarks, and it has no effect on this), my fstab, some camcontrol inquiry information, and my dmesg output. Everything seems to be alright to me, so I'm at a loss for this poor performance. Any input would be appreciated.

http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/fstab
http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/dmesg
http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/raid1.png
http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/raid2.png
http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/raid3.png

rattlesnake# camcontrol devlist
<Areca Seagate Raid5 R001>         at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,da0)
<Areca ARC-1220-VOL#01 R001>       at scbus0 target 0 lun 1 (pass1,da1)
<Areca RAID controller R001>       at scbus0 target 16 lun 0 (pass2)
rattlesnake# camcontrol inquiry 0:0
pass0: <Areca Seagate Raid5 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
pass0: Serial Number 0000004267179126
pass0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit), Command Queueing Enabled
rattlesnake# camcontrol inquiry 0:0:0
pass0: <Areca Seagate Raid5 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
pass0: Serial Number 0000004267179126
pass0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit), Command Queueing Enabled
rattlesnake# camcontrol inquiry 0:0:1
pass1: <Areca ARC-1220-VOL#01 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
pass1: Serial Number 0000002877601663
pass1: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit), Command Queueing Enabled

 

[madcoder]

It could be several things. Be ready to post your exact hard drive models, and their current firmware versions. Then, the Arecas don't always play nice with all motherboards. Then there are configuration based reasons that it might be a bit slow, for example the stripe sizing and whether or not you properly aligned the partition. Jus over at the 2cpu forums along with some of the storage heavy hitters over there could probably help. Do some searches there first as well.

 

[Fryguy8]

http://fryguy.rattlesnake.ath.cx:81/raidprobs/raid4.png

There's more detailed drive information. Board is an ASUS A8N-SLI, listed as being fine on Areca's motherboard compatibility list. Everything else you asked for is it previous screenshots and logs.

You mentioned configuration changes. I expected that to be the case. Care to elaborate on what configuration things I should be looking at? That's one of the primary reasons I'm asking in a forum in the first place, for information on what to change, not a blanket statement "oh, just change configuration stuff"

I had thought I did enough due dilligence in investigating the problem myself to get some meaningful answers.

 

[mwroobel]

I have an areca 1230 with 12x 750GB Seagate 7200.10's on an A8n32-SLI Deluxe. I am getting about 5 times your read speed. Even with the additional number of spindles in my system, you should be getting a lot more than what you are. There is a good review of the 1221 at http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1221x/ which will give you a large number of benchmarks. One thing that stands out...... Do you have the original A8N-SLI? If I remember correctly, that has 2 x16 slots, but if you have a video card in PCIe slot 1 it runs at x16, and relegates the second x16 slot to x1. Yep, I just checed http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=382&l1=3&l2=15&l3=148&l4=0. The 1220 is a x8 card and if you have a PCIe video card, it is running the x8 Areca in x1 mode, that could create a significant bottleneck, but even x1 should give you more thoroughput than you currently have. You could try putting in an old PCI video card, and moving the areca to the first x16 shot and see if the thoroughput increases.