[jwhat]

Hi SGI'ers,

final update on this one...

I pulled second Acard ARS-2320S from O350 as this had IRIX boot disk for Onyx 4 ATI Graphics configuration, which for sure I am never going to use again, best just to stick with V12.

As this has SCA 80 pin connector, I again had to wait 2 weeks for shipping from China to get SCA (80 pin) to U160 68 pin converter.

So reconfigured Fuel to boot off Acard based SSD and also consolidated everything onto single SSD disk (usual fx, dvhtool & xfsdump/xfsrestore system clone)  as the fuel came with 2 spinning SCSI disks.

Run diskperf as I was curious if U160 bus with SSD's would get near SAS3442 performance.

Here are results:

>> # diskperf -W -D -c4g -n "fuel/pink UW160 ACARD/SATA/SAMSUNG EVO 850" testfile
>> #---------------------------------------------------------
>> # Disk Performance Test Results Generated By Diskperf V1.2
>> #
>> # Test name     : fuel/pink UW160 ACARD/SATA/SAMSUNG EVO 850
>> # Test date     : Fri Oct 16 16:31:13 2020
>> # Test machine  : IRIX64 pink 6.5 07202013 IP35
>> # Test type     : XFS data subvolume
>> # Test path     : testfile
>> # Request sizes : min=16384 max=4194304
>> # Parameters    : direct=1 time=10 scale=1.000 delay=0.000
>> # XFS file size : 4294967296 bytes
>> #---------------------------------------------------------
>> # req_size  fwd_wt  fwd_rd  bwd_wt  bwd_rd  rnd_wt  rnd_rd
>> #  (bytes)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)  (MB/s)
>> #---------------------------------------------------------
>>       16384   42.49   43.17   42.33   37.55   42.48   37.52
>>       32768   61.65   59.98   61.64   54.22   61.60   53.74
>>      65536   79.52   85.20   79.46   78.93   79.36   78.15
>>      131072   85.45   94.65   85.44   86.95   85.38   86.16
>>      262144   87.64  100.91   87.67   92.18   87.68   91.45
>>      524288   88.07  103.34   88.09   93.01   88.09   92.71
>>     1048576   87.38  103.38   87.38   93.70   87.37   94.86
>>     2097152   85.32  100.92   85.33   97.13   85.32   96.65
>>     4194304   81.13   95.31   81.14   93.11   81.13   93.28

These result are pretty much consistent with those on Ian Mapleson's  fuel page, for 15K RPM SCSI disk (with exception of smaller random reads, where SSD performance significantly better).

So Acard ARS-2320S (connected to U160 bus) with SATA SSD does not provide the equivalent performance boost, that I saw with Octane.

Based on this I reconfigured machine again so it now has: / (root) on ACARD/SATA SSD and /usr with SATA SSD on SAS3442, as it would seem remise not to take advantage of the significant performance improvement provided by SAS3442.

The interactive performance of my fuel now feels almost as snappy as my Mac ;-)

And the pile of retired SCSI HDs continues to grow.


Cheers from Oz,


John.