# 3ware Escalade 6200

## svan9420

This raid controller is recognized as scsi controller and has native kernel support.  You can compile as a module or compile into the kernel.  I chose the latter.  The installation iso supports this controller from start up, but you need to install the following modules by typing:

modprobe 3w-xxxx

modprobe sr_mod

modprobe sd_mod

This will install the 3ware driver as well as set up the scsi device files located under /dev

Hope this helps someone who is new to Gentoo to become familiar with the 3ware raid controller.

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## Guest

i am interested to know a bit more if you have it running and can get some reads from hdparm out of it....i was looking to get either a scsi controller or a 3ware for the ide drives i already own....is your performance pretty good?

i am getting about 40mb/s with a single udma5 drive

i have been playing witht eh highpoint 370 but it is pretty weak and i havent been too impressed as of yet

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## svan9420

Let me play around with it and see if I can give you some statistics on it.  Currently i have it in a raid 0 configuration, which should yield the best performance, but without any redundancy.

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## Guest

yeah thats cool...i dont like redundancy....lol...i was looking at lsr but the 3ware has been said to be very good. thanks

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## Guest

does this silence mean the performance is really abismal....lol

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## svan9420

Oops sorry about the delay in responding to this forum.  I was installing Oracle 8i on Gentoo.  

I had better give you my system specs too so you can make an educated decision.  

Abit A7V motherboard

512 MB RAM (pc133)

3ware raid controler model escalade 6200, two Maxter 7200 RPM hard drives at 30 GB each (raid 0)

AMD Athlon 750 Mhz Processor

GEFORCE2 Video card with 32 MB of RAM

Bonnie++ results: (sorry, I tried to make the output decipherable)

------Sequential Output------ 

-Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- 

Size   K/sec   %CP   K/sec   %CP   K/sec 

 1G    7352    98      60883   71      21374 

--Sequential Input- --Random-

-Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--

 %CP   K/sec   %CP   K/sec   %CP    /sec      %CP

  18      6976    89      59577   35      211.8     1

------Sequential Create------

-Create-- --Read--- -Delete--

files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP 

16     621  96  +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 

--------Random Create--------

-Create-- --Read--- -Delete--

/sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP

 803  99 +++++ +++  2182  98

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## Guest

what is bonnie++?....lol...sorry i dont have a clue what all that means....i was thinking just like hdparm -t /dev/whatever it is under fstab....only cuz i am an idiot aparently and can only understand throughput in terms of MB/s.

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## svan9420

Bonnie++ is a disk IO program.   I will try to give you some results in more simplistic terms.  But there are actually many aspects to disk IO you need to consider.  I will post some results later.  

I am not sure hdparm will work for the 3ware controller because it is recognized as a scsi disk volume, but I will give it a go  :Smile: 

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## Guest

lol....i couldnt get bonnie++ to run.....does it work with all hard drives (ide and scsi)....i unpacked it ./configure make make install but i cant get it to execute

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## svan9420

Try this:

root# emerge --pretend bonnie++

root# emerge bonnie++

What are your make.conf settings.  Do you have any wierd compiler flags set.  Anyway, here is my hdparm results. I believe hdparm is intended more for IDE drives.  Although the 3-ware controller uses ide drives, it appears as a scsi device.  

root# hdparm -t /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:

Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.81 seconds = 35.36 MB/sec

Hope that helps you out. 

I think Gentoo provides the best environment to learn linux because you do not have a GUI configuration utility that allows you to blindly configure your linux box.

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## Guest

well i did run emerge and it said it couldnt find bonnie++...so i just tried installing it from a tar.gz i found on the net but it just wouldnt execute.

thats what i was kinda thinking as far as read speed for the 3ware...i dont think it works under linux...like its of all the raid cards out for ide the best supported but LSR runs faster...i ordered a tx2 ide controller and am going to try that since its like 19 bucks...now with a single drive i get 40mb/s...i was rading that under linux software raid0 it should approach 70mb/s...but i am just doing it for fun...anything like 30 and up i dont think you can really tell anyway.....unless you are doing huge file transfers like for video editing and the like.

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## Guest

thats too wierd...i ran #emerge --pretend bonnie++ this morning and got that it wasnt found now it just emerged correctly adn installed...lol....maybe i was still sleepin and made a typo or sumthin

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## svan9420

Yeah, my 3ware card is a little on the old side.  Back in the day, 35 MB/sec was considered screaming.  It is definitely has been a stable raid card and offloads a lot of IO processing to the card as well rather than using your processor.  

Have you checked out the escalade 7xxx series, they can fit into a 64 bit PCI slot and have a lot more bandwidth.  

Let me know how your tx2 works for ya

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## Guest

yeah i was going to get the newer 3ware...but i want to try the LSR first...i have a  dual plll board...so i think that cpu overhead will be not too much a  problem...and like i had said earier its not as though you would notice the speed in most applications....just running with udma5 on this single drive is fast reallly...i just wanted to set it up.....i am no sure yet how to correctly append grub though...but i think i will set up the raid then copy my root patition...just have o see if i can find the correct syntax to point grub in the right direction....my card should get here like thursday so i'll let you know what happens...thanks for all your input too

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## Guest

hey sven...i couldnt get it installed on gentoo...it blew y install up and went to a constant rebooting loop so i trashed gentoo and installed mandrake 8.2 ...it has support for LSR from the beginning of the installation...so i was able to create a / on LSR raid0 config using the tx2 and two ibm 60gxp drives and hdparm gives me a killer 96mb/s...lol...i like gentoo but its too unstable adn there is not help for anything but the most ordinary scenarios

but enough b*tching...anyway...almost 100mb/s is that the bomb or what...if your gonna stay with linux dont get a raid controller just get a regular ide controller and do LSR....you can even do raid5...very cool

ciao

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## svan9420

That is some pretty awesome performance.  I might have to set up a box using nothing but LSR.  I heard of a slashot article where someone set up a terrabyte raid array using software raid and multiple IDE controllers. If I built a machine dedicated to nothing but LSR, then I could have a central place to store all my files. 

Anyway, thanks for the information on LSR.

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## gwung

hi,

i was trying to follow this discussion to install a 3ware 2-port card as my primary boot device on a freshly installed gentoo, 2004.1.

did modprobe 3w-xxxx on first boot to get the livecd  to reconize the card and proceed with the installation.

after everything is done using genkernel, rebooted, but cannot find the 3ware device, therefore cannot boot to the hdd.

please advice.

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## cbock

gwung, i've posted about my experience with a 3ware 7500-4. 

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=166147

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