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Wednesday May 30, 2007

SATA NCQ vdbench results - issued concurrently v. singly These are the test results that were gathered in comparing I/O throughput with NCQ commands (FPDMA READ/WRITE) being issued one at a time and with NCQ commands being issued concurrently (up to 32 at a time).

NCQ commands issued one at a time:

params1 represents random reads, unrestricted
params2 represents random reads, restricted to first 4GB
params3 represents sequential reads
params4 represents random writes, unrestricted
params5 represents random writes, restricted to first 4GB
params6 represents sequential writes

NCQ commands issued concurrently:

params1 represents random reads, unrestricted
params2 represents random reads, restricted to first 4GB
params3 represents sequential reads
params4 represents random writs, unrestricted
params5 represents random writs, restricted to first 4GB
params6 represents sequential writes

( May 30 2007, 12:14:25 AM PDT ) Permalink

Monday August 21, 2006

SunFire X4500 SATA driver Hi, I am Lida Horn, a Solaris engineer who has been working on new driver technology for Solaris 11 (aka Nevada, aka OpenSolaris) and Solaris 10 Updates 2 & 3. This is a new driver for Marvell SATA controllers.

The marvell88sx driver takes advantage of the SATA features and performance including hot plugging and 3.0Gb/sec transfer speeds.

This driver utilizes the new SATA framework which does SCSI to ATA translation. This allows virtually all of the functionality of the sd (SCSI Disk) driver to be utilized. Further, SMART capability is built in for additional reliability.

This driver's benefits are most readily seen on a platform such as the SunFire X4500 (aka Thumper) where 6 Marvell 88SX6081 controllers, each on its own PCI bus, are connected to a disk array of 48 SATA disks. Each disk is 500GB giving a total capacity of 24TB and a combined disk I/O throughput of 3.2GB/sec.

When Sun's new file system, ZFS is used on the platform, the combined system gives a remarkable combination of performance, reliability, availability and capacity. ( Aug 21 2006, 07:26:56 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]

Tuesday June 14, 2005

ATA and SATA drivers Hi my name is Lida Horn and here are the drivers that I wrote for Sun: an I2O block driver and a PCMCIA ATA driver. (I wrote these back about 5 years ago, I am a Sun re-tread). Right now I am busy working on the next generation of SATA drivers which will take advantage of SATA II features. I must say the performance of the new SATA driver rocks :-), I can not go into details of what chips and what hardware for now. Stay tuned!

Monday May 16, 2005

Lida's Weblog Space holder ( May 16 2005, 06:13:13 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]