Messages in this thread | | | From | "Martin A. Fink" <> | Subject | SATA Performance with Intel ICH6 | Date | Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:07:01 +0100 |
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Dear all,
I found out, that writing to a SATA harddisk costs around 20% of the computers cpu time. I write blocks of 1MB size to a file. Write performance is around 51MB/s what I think is really good. My computer has an Intel ICH6 chipset and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor. If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.
Can I do anything to optimize writing from memory to disk?
My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s. From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.
So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of SATA driver of my operating system?
time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000 results in
real 0m52.561s user 0m0.003s sys 0m7.407s
and strace dd... gives among other information 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?
By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM
Thank you for answers,
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