Interesting times. I got my ServeRaid 6i, installed it, but I’m having similar issues with performance that my friend did with his ServeRaid 4LX in part 1 of this article.

My system is a bit different from my friend.

IBM xSeries 345 2GB Registered ECC PC2100 (2x1GB) 2x36GB 10K RPM U320 2×2.8Ghz Xeon w/ Hyperthreading (Prestonia core)

Here’s a sample of the card right after install of the card, and W2k3 Std R2, and some simple patches using 2x36GB 10k RPM U320 hard drives in RAID 0 in 8KB stripe.

IBM ServeRaid 6.10 Drivers RAID0 8KB stripe

This benchmark was done with the drivers which installed without doing anything. Fairly pathetic if you ask me.

Let’s see what we can do to increase the performance. Let’s try getting the drivers and firmware updated to 7.12 for both.

Same spec, but drivers and firmware at 7.12:

IBM ServeRaid 7.12 Drivers RAID0 8KB stripe

Okay, a little better, but not really that much.

Now, I backed up the configuration, and changed the stripe size to 64KB (max on this card). Unfortunately this can’t be done with a bios prompt, but you have to run the bootable ServeRaid manager (Basically a bootable Linux distro).

IBM ServeRaid 7.12 Drivers RAID0 64KB stripe

The average performance is much better, but it’s still all over the place. I’d like to see some normal looking decay. And those valleys into the 30’s worries me.

In a bit, I’ll benchmark single disk performance, and maybe even try testing in Linux.

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