Performace Tips

TIP 1: PARTITIONING DRIVES.

Before installing Linux or adding
DAC960 logical drives to an existing Linux
system, the controller must first be
configured to provide one or more logical
drives using the BIOS Configuration
Utility or DACCF.  Please note that since
there are only at most 6 usable
partitions on each logical drive, systems
requiring more partitions should
subdivide a drive group into multiple
logical drives, each of which can have
up to 6 partitions.  Also, note that
with large disk arrays it is advisable
to enable the 8GB BIOS Geometry (255/63)
rather than accepting the default 2GB
BIOS Geometry (128/32); failing to do so
will cause the logical drive geometry
to have more than 65535 cylinders which
will make it impossible for FDISK to be
used properly.  The 8GB BIOS Geometry
can be enabled by configuring the
DAC960 BIOS, which is accessible via
Alt-M during the BIOS initialization
sequence.

TIP 2:FS SETUP FOR SPEED

For maximum performance and the most
efficient E2FSCK performance, it is
recommended that EXT2 file systems
be built with 4KB block size and 16 block
stride to match the DAC960 controller's
64KB default stripe size.  The command
"mke2fs -b 4096 -R stride=16 " is
appropriate.  Unless there will be a
large number of small files on the file
systems, it is also beneficial to add
the "-i 16384" option to increase the
bytes per inode parameter thereby reducing
the file system metadata.  Finally, on
systems that will only be run with
Linux 2.2 or later kernels it is
beneficial to enable sparse superblocks
with the "-s 1" option.
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