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This article will highlight the disk drive tests I ran on my
ASUS A8V Deluxe. I'm about
to set this machine up to do various things, including cross compiling (which I wrote about back in
October). I still haven't finished what I wanted to do, which is set
up this machine with RAID-1 running FreeBSD 6.0. When I started, 6.0 had not yet been released.
Now I'm about to redo some of my work and expand the scope slightly.
Here is what I plan to do. I have some SATA and some IDE drives that I'm going to test on various configurations to see
what setup gives me the fastest results. I don't expect the differences to be huge. This isn't scientific. I'm just
using the hardware I have.
I will be testing the various configurations shown in the table below:
| | on board | 3Ware 7006-2 | gmirror |
| SATA | - | n/a | - |
| IDE | - | - | - |
The columns represent the type of RAID-1 I will be using. The mainboard offers both SATA and IDE RAID-1.
The 3Ware 7006-2 does only IDE, not SATA.
I will also be testing gmirror(8).
For the gmirror part, I will be using Dru's recent article:
Using Software RAID-1 with FreeBSD.
And for kicks and giggles, I'll also try just a plain old SATA and plain old IDE (i.e. no RAID-1).
All testing was done on the same machine. For each test I installed 6.0-RELEASE, did a cvsup
of both the ports and source tree. Then I did a build world and upgraded to 6.0-STABLE. Each
cvsup was against the same image of the repository (i.e. my local cvsup server, which I did not
update during the course of this testing) to ensure each system was running against the same STABLE.
With the system running on 6.0-STABLE, I then installed PostgreSQL 8.1 (along with some other packages),
and ran a simple test:
time psql freshports.org < freshports.sql
I am interested only in the elapsed time. I don't care about anything else. I want throughput. And I want
it fast.
I could have used a snapshot. I didn't. I could have used some other test. I didn't. I used what I had
and did a test that is both disk intensive and CPU intensive.
FYI: the FreshPorts database I'm using is the daily backup taken at 29 Dec 2005 at 03:41. The file is about
526MB.
At the time of the test, these packages were installed:
$ pkg_info
bash-3.0.16_1 The GNU Project's Bourne Again SHell
bison-1.75_2,1 A parser generator from FSF, (mostly) compatible with Yacc
cvsup-without-gui-16.1h_2 General network file distribution system optimized for CVS
gettext-0.14.5 GNU gettext package
gmake-3.80_2 GNU version of 'make' utility
joe-2.8_5 Joe's own editor
libiconv-1.9.2_1 A character set conversion library
m4-1.4.4 GNU m4
postgresql-client-8.1.1 PostgreSQL database (client)
postgresql-contrib-8.1.1 The contrib utilities from the PostgreSQL distribution
postgresql-server-8.1.1_1 The most advanced open-source database available anywhere
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