In the interest of science, I ordered another motherboard for fluffy. I got a refurbed Gigabyte GA-7VT600 based on the Via chipset instead of the Nvidia based motherboard I have now. Some interesting results.
Samba is a lot faster. Downloads are a dead 25.7MB/sec. Uploads are now peaking at 25MB/sec, but are still incredibly erratic. They will be at 25MB/sec for about 4 seconds fall down to 10MB/sec for 2 seconds, fall to 1MB/sec then back to 25MB/sec for 10 seconds until the file is done. I couldn’t get the other motherboard to go over 15MB/sec uploading. What is causing the erratic jumping? No idea. I have played around a lot with the smb.conf file, but I’m not really getting anywhere. It really seems like there’s a buffering issue at work here, but I don’t know how to troubleshoot it. I don’t know if it’s a Linux issue, or the fact that I’ve got a slower boot drive or what. I did read that samba performance is much higher with the 2.6 kernel though. I’m looking forward to seeing what SuSE 9.1 has to offer in this realm. What I really need is for someone with a linux server on gigabit to tell me that samba works really fast on their network.
RAID writes much faster. Bonnie is now reporting 98MB/sec writes to the raid. Previous was 71MB/sec. Mysteriously, read speed has dropped 9MB/sec to around 132MB/sec. I’m willing to make the trade off for increased writes. This is a MLB with the same bus speed, processor, ram and disk controllers. Weird huh? And the processor runs about 15°C cooler on this MLB. I like this logic board.
It was $45 from newegg.com. I’m thinking about putting the GA-7N400 Pro2 into another case and using as a desktop box. It would be fun to have a machine I can constantly be messing up and not worry about it.
When swapping the motherboard, my drive designations got completely hosed (saw my first port on my first controller as /dev/hda instead of the MLB port) and I was certain the RAID would get nuked. But no. MD recognized that things changed and started up the raid with the new designations. That makes me very happy. I read somewhere how to assign permanent drive letters to particular drives, but I can’t find the link anymore. This is something I will be doing on new systems.