On Friday, 24. March 2002 22:18:21 David wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First off, I'd like to thank Andre Hedrick for the link to:
> http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html
>
> It was very helpful in making me understand why the performance of my
> newly bought Adaptec 2400A IDE-Raid card sucked so badly in combination
> with my VIA KT133 based board.
>
> I have done some testing (on the Win platform since that's where the
> patches to remedy this situation are available) that shows quite nicely
> how the PCI bus gets totally overrun by transfer rates in excess of
> approximately 74MB/s and instead slows down.
>
> Short summary
> =============
> Expected rate Experienced rate
> 84MB/s
> 50MB/s
> 80MB/s
> 64MB/s
> 74MB/s
> 74MB/s
> (If someone is very interested, mail me and I can publish some transfer
> rate graphs online)
Can you please redo with latest VIA fix applied?
PrePatch: http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/5.html
Via Patch: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=66#raid
Post Patch: http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/11.html
rpp1.02.zip
Thanks,
Dieter
--
Dieter N?tzel
Graduate Student, Computer Science
University of Hamburg
Department of Computer Science
@home: [email protected]
Hi all,
I got some mails regarding my first mail and I'll try to respond to the
feedback...
Mark Hahn wrote:
>>newly bought Adaptec 2400A IDE-Raid card sucked so badly
>>in combination with my VIA KT133 based board.
>
>
> that's a bizarre combination: quite old/cheap motherboard with a
> fairly expensive HW raid card.
>
Yes, but that was the box that was available for testing currently.
Thats life :-)
> of course, you could do everyone a big favor by finding a tool that
> would dump the chipset's PCI config space under windows, to see what
> the patch changes. under Linux, of course, lspci does this.
Yes, I could do that (using WPCREDIT), but I'd like to know that it
would be helpful to some kernel hackers first, so mail me and I'll do it.
If someone *is* interested, I'll dump bus0,dev0,func0 (Host Bridge) and
bus0,dev1,func0 (PCI-PCI bridge) with and without patches installed, is
there any other device that should be included (like IDE-controller)?
Dieter N?tzel wrote:
> Can you please redo with latest VIA fix applied?
I did try with the latest VIA patch applied (it gave approx 4Mb/s in
increase). However, some more research has uncovered yet more hardware
issues that may (in combination with the VIA issues) be the "real"
perpetrator.
Apparently (by looking at the links at the end of this mail), SeaGate
Barracuda IV's and RAID is a big mistake. I will RMA the drives and buy
some other brand before I continue benchmarking the 2400A card.
Thanks to Mark, Dieter and Ville.
Regards,
David
Barracuda IV problem links
==========================
http://forums.storagereview.com/viewtopic.php?t=2154
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=430
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=85
http://www.viahardware.com/faq/kt7/faqhpt370.htm#barracuda
http://www.baluma.com/hardware/almacenamiento/barracudaIV/home.asp
http://www.msi.com.tw/forum/index.php?target=article&tid=6899&page=2
http://www.geocities.com/teomorell/st380021a/winbench.htm
http://forums.storagereview.net/viewtopic.php?t=1333