I've had very good experiences with the 3Ware line, though the only SATA unit I've used is the 8500-8, not the 8506-X. One thing you might check is to be sure that your driver version and firmware version are in sync. 3Ware does seem to release new drivers quite often, and most driver upgrades require that you also upgrade the firmware and display manager. I believe that support for the 85xx is compiled into the kernel so you might want to check that your firmware isn't a different version from whatever is compiled into the kernel. The one box I have with an 8500-x in it is presently being use to test Windows 2003 server, but it was initially loaded with SuSE 8.2 (shrink wrapped production version, not the beta - don't know if anything is different) and it did very well. I can't confirm any specific tests copying large files, but don't recall any need to test for that (performance seemed fine). Not sure what would happen if the firmware and driver were different versions, but poor performance is certainly one possibility. Dan -----Original Message----- From: Mark Horton [mailto:mark@nostromo.net] Sent: Friday, October 10, 2003 3:05 PM To: suse-amd64@suse.com Subject: [suse-amd64] 3ware SATA controller Hi, I'm using Sles 8.2beta9 for some testing and have come accross a performance issue with a SATA card. This is in a dual opteron system using the Rioworks HDAMA motherboard. I added a 3ware 8506-4LP SATA raid controller card with 2 drives attached to it. I'm seeing slow performance copying large files when I use the controller to build a raid-0 array. Copying a 5GB file takes about 6 minutes. I deleted the array from the controller and left the 2 drives to be regocnized by the OS. I then built a raid-0 array using 'mdadm'. I can now copy the same 5GB file in about 95 seconds. This is on a fresh reboot so I know the file isn't cached. My first question is, does anyone else have this card? and if so are they seeing any performance issues in their opteron system? Any idea if I should I go to 3ware for opteron linux support? Or is the driver an open source project? Last question isnt amd_64 specific but if anyone knows the answer I would appreciate it. Will I take a noticable performance hit using raid-0 in the OS as opposed to the controller card? (Assuming they improve performance on the card.) Mark -- Check the List-Unsubscribe header to unsubscribe For additional commands, email: suse-amd64-help@suse.com