Hi all, We have a new machine with 3ware 9650SE controllers and I am testing hardware RAID and linux software MD raid performances. For now I am on hardware RAID. I have setup a raid-0 with 14 drives. If I create an xfs filesystem on it (whole device, no partitioning, aligned stripes during mkfs, etc) then I write to a file with dd (or with bonnie++) like this: sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/tmp/ddtry bs=1M count=6000 conv=fsync ; time sync about 540MB/sec come out (last sync takes 0 seconds). This is similar to 3ware-declared performances of 561MB/sec http://www.3ware.com/KB/Article.aspx?id=15300 however, if instead I write directly to the block device like this sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches ; dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=6000 conv=fsync ; time sync performance is 260MB/sec!?!? (last sync takes 0 seconds) I tried many times and this is the absolute fastest I could obtain. I tweaked the bs, the count, I removed the conv=fsync... i ensured 3ware caches are ON on the block device, I set anticipatory scheduler... No way. I am positive that creating the xfs filesystem and writing on it is definitely faster than writing to the block device directly. How could that be!? Anyone knows what's happening? Please note that the machine is absolutely clean and there is no other workload. I am running kernel 2.6.31 (ubuntu 9.10 alpha live). Thank you

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