As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve recently bought two new computer, and built them up. I’ve settled on the Toshiba 3TB DT01ACA300 HDD as my drive of choice for these systems. I ran a few tests recently and found some interesting results. I haven’t published them here yet. My main test is a database load. I just take an 8GB text file and create a PostgreSQL database from it. The file in question is a dump of the FreshPorts database. Once loaded, it’s about 33GB on disk. I reckon this is a good decent test. It writes, it reads, it writes some more. It’s easily reproducible.
These tests took about 14.5 minutes to run.
Then I moved those HDD to another server. I planned to run the same tests there.
On this different server, the tests take 21 minutes. That’s a 50% performance hit.
WHY?
In both cases, the HDD are attached to the M/B, as opposed to a SATA card.
The motherboards in question are:
fast one
- motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL+-F Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1155 Intel C202 DDR3 1333 (manufacturer page) – $179.99
- CPU – Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 69W Quad-Core Server Processor – $239.99
- RAM – Samsung DDR3-1600 8GB/1Gx72 ECC Samsung Chip Server Memory – M391B1G73BH0-CK0 (16GB for $145.40)
not so fast one
- motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O ATX Server Motherboard (Supermicro link): $224.99
- CPU – AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server : $284.99
- CPU Cooler – Noctua NH-U9DO A3 AMD Opteron, 4 Dual Heat-pipe SSO Bearing Quiet CPU Cooler : $76.99
- RAM – Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1600 Server Memory : 4 x $64.99 = $259.96
Conclusions?
I guess we can clearly state that the Intel Xeon is blazingly faster than the AMD Opteron. I just didn’t expect such a big difference.
Did I buy the wrong CPU for the other M/B?
May be different SATA mode? AHCI vs IDE or another ?
On the slower server, all the HDD are connected to a SATA card… Hopefully that’s running in SATA III mode. But that is something to investigate. Thank you.
See also the latest post which shows bonnie++.
Based on the fact that your bonnie++ is showing speeds over 300mb/sec, I am assuming that the better server is doing SATA III (6G/s) and the slower one is only doing SATA II (3G/s)
Both are doing SATA II speeds.
Bonnie++ isn’t accessing the drives directly. That’s the speed when writing to ZFS, so that will be split across drives.
In BIOS m/b you can select prefered SATA-mode
I will check that. But for what its worth, the faster system has the drives connected to the M/B. The slower system has the drives connected to the LSI SATA card (which, presumably, will not be using the M/B BIOS settings).