Given the fact that most SATA drives have only an 8MB cache, and your RAID controller should have at least 64MB, I would argue that the system with the RAID controller should always be faster. If it's not, you're getting short-changed somewhere, which is typical on linux, because the drivers just aren't there for a great many controllers that are out there.
Alex.
On 6/15/06, Mark Lewis <mark.lewis@mir3.com> wrote: On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 18:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I agree with Brian's suspicion that the SATA drive isn't properly
> fsync'ing to disk, resulting in bogusly high throughput. However,
> ISTM a well-configured SAN ought to be able to match even the bogus
> throughput, because it should be able to rely on battery-backed
> cache to hold written blocks across a power failure, and hence should
> be able to report write-complete as soon as it's got the page in cache
> rather than having to wait till it's really down on magnetic platter.
> Which is what the SATA drive is doing ... only it can't keep the promise
> it's making for lack of any battery backup on its on-board cache.
It really depends on your SAN RAID controller. We have an HP SAN; I
don't remember the model number exactly, but we ran some tests and with
the battery-backed write cache enabled, we got some improvement in write
performance but it wasn't NEARLY as fast as an SATA drive which lied
about write completion.
The write-and-fsync latency was only about 2-3 times better than with no
write cache at all. So I wouldn't assume that just because you've got a
write cache on your SAN, that you're getting the same speed as
fsync=off, at least for some cheap controllers.
-- Mark Lewis
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