*BSD News Article 11165


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From: mike@starburst.umd.edu (Michael F. Santangelo)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: [BSDI] EISA Adaptec 1740 in ENHANCED mode experiences?
Date: 14 Feb 1993 05:57:02 GMT
Organization: University of Maryland, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <1lkmveINNqpu@cbl.umd.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: starburst.umd.edu
Keywords: BSDI, EISA, Adaptec, 1740,ENHANCED-MODE

I am running BSDI's BSD/386 at v0.9.4.1 with a new Adaptec 1740 EISA
SCSI controller (latest firmware) in "ENHANCED" mode.  I have an
HP97548S SCSI disk drive and WANGTEK QIC 320/525 MB tape.  All
work well, and BSDI's kernel reports the Adaptec as running
in this new "fast" ENHANCED mode, but throughput to the HP SCSI
disk is less-than-stellar at between 430KB/sec & 490KB/sec (latter
achived tuning filesystem to rotdelay=0ms).  I benched it by
dd'ing a 20MB test file to /dev/null bs=8k.  I've fooled with
maxcontig and rotdelay with tunefs (rebooting each time and verifying
with dumpfs that the params took, they did) but best I could achieve
was the latter figure.  I haven't tried switching the Adaptec to STANDARD
mode but it is the only thing I can think to try next (bug in ENHANCED
driver?).  The raw HP disk xfer rate should be about 1.72MB/sec, and even
with DOS IO on the same machine I was seeing 780KB/sec with CHECKIT v3.0
(which alreays reports conservative xfer ratings for disks) with the same
disk.

The system is an AT&T StarServer "S" (33Mhz 486DX all-EISA system).

Anybody have any ideas as to what might be causing the mediocre
performance?  Thanks..
--
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Michael F. Santangelo                 + Internet: mike@cbl.umd.edu      [work]
Computer & Network Systems Lead       +           mike@kavishar.umd.edu [home]
Univ MD: CEES / CBL (Solomons Island) + BITNET:   MIKE@UMUC  [fwd to mike@cbl]