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Firstly the 2010S ZCR card. I was given such a card to put into a
Supermicro server 6022P-6, the old one with the P4DP6 serverboard.
While benchmarks do not tell the whole story they do tell me that I
could better sequential reads from an IDE drive than 6 Ultra3 15k
drives in RAID 0.
The machine in question is equipped with the Adaptec AIC-7899 HBA
which is U160, the 2010S ZCR is of course U320. Adaptec state that
their card will "function correctly" if reflashed with their U160
firmware.
The system works, whether it works "correctly" is another matter.
I installed the modelling applications that I use on other more and
less powerful machines and the performance was very poor.
I benchmarked out of curiosity and the sequential reads for six
drives in RAID 0, 4 drives in 0,1, two drives in RAID 1 and six drives
in RAID 5 all showed a flatish graph of some 52/54MBS.
When I have looked at read tests on other boxes the graph has a
profile, for single drives or arrays. This machine appears to have a
bottleneck. Crap card? Crap drivers? The card is shy of warranty so no
Adaptec support and zero data in their ASK pages. If it is a crap card
how in the name of god did they get away with selling it and why would
a reputable outfit like Supermicro build servers with ZCR facility?
Have tooled with stripe width, caching, read ahead in just about
every combination.
If the card gets binned I have the option to buy a 2200s for v cheap.
I will not spend big on the Supermicro as it will be put out to grass
soon but I need to install a 2 channel solution that will provide good
bandwidth for U160 or U320 arrays.

Guest

For anybody who is familiar with these products the motherboard
revision is v2.0, the BIOS is v1.5. On the ZCR card is the firmware
recommended by Adaptec is 2005380E, BIOS is v1.62, SMOR is 0066.112.
The drives used are 6x Fujitsu 73GB 10k U320 (MAW3073NC) 6x Compaq
36GB 15k U160.
The drives planned for this box are the Compaq units but the
Fujitsu drives have been tried should the Compaq drives be proprietory
in a crucial aspect of firmware or construction.
OS has to be winx86 family.
I ask for help as a rank amateur in this field, my supplier advises
that I stop tinkering and buy into today (he claims tomorrow) as the
time is right. That is what he always says.