On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 09:24:58AM -0700, R Parker wrote:
I'm running an ICP hardware raid controler with
raid
level 5 and reiserfs. In addition to that, I run an
rsync mirror to an IDE drive. I'm considering
switching from raid 5 to 0 because I do see read
problems and maybe some of the xruns occur during
write. The read problems appear with Ardour while
doing REW or F/FWD seeks and the messages are
something about disk read access error.
Try using something other than reiser too, it has been known to cause
realtime problems in some kernels.
I've tried to google up some hints for
performance
tuning with hardware raid but haven't found any
obvious suggestions. With the mirror running every 24
hours, I can probably afford to forgo the hardware
redundancy.
The stripe size is the one that matters most IME. With hardware you
shouldn't be seeing any performacen problems with RAID5 (or with software
for that matter). It is possible that the card or driver is hogging the
PCI bus though.
If its a server motherboard, some of the PCI slots may belong to different
PCI buses, if yours is like that you could try putting the RAID controller
on a bus of its own. I dont know how to tell in software, but the manual
should say.
- Steve