[Asterisk-Users] RAID affecting X100P performance...

[Steven Critchfield]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 14:14, Mike Benoit wrote:
> I have a P3-800 with two IDE drives in a software RAID1 configuration.
> Each drive is on a separate IDE channel. Now anytime there is HD
> activity, I hear "beeps" and "cutting out" on a call using the X100P
> card. 
> 
> I ran the zttest program, and discovered HD activity would drop the
> accuracy down to between 2% and 50%. 
> 
> However I noticed if I disabled one drive in the RAID1 array, zttest
> would always report 99.98% or higher. So one drive running works fine,
> but as soon as I enable the second drive, all hell breaks loose. DMA and
> 32-bit mode are enabled on both drives as well.
> 
> I have a backup server with two Promise PCI IDE controllers in it, with
> 4 drives in a software RAID5 configuration, so just out of curiosity
> sake, I stuck a X100P card in it and tried running zttest while the RAID
> was re-syncing. The results were pretty bad. 
> 
> --- Results after 384 passes ---
> Best: 36.779785 -- Worst: 1.562500
> 
> Is this a poor mainboard issue, or is it actually not possible to do IDE
> software RAID on a machine running Asterisk with X100P cards?
> 
> Is anyone currently doing it?

Software raid is bad. IDE hardware raid isn't much better. Software raid
is always going to eat your system alive since the CPU has to be busy
with 2 or more writes as opposed to it's normal 1. 

Raid 5 spreads the load over spindles and should take less CPU total,
but don't bet on it if it is IDE. 

Go SCSI or don't do RAID.
-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>