Perc 3 DC

Hi chaps,

I've had this old card sitting on my desk for a while. It appears to be a U160 card with 128Mb BBU so I thought I'd wang it in my test machine (denian etch) and give it a bash.

I set up 4 36Gb drives in raid 0+1, but I don't seem to be able to get more than 20MB/s write speed out of it for large files (2XRAM usual tests with dd from dev/zero). I don't expect anything great, but I thought it'd do a little better than that.

I've tried writeback and write through modes, tried changing cache flush times, disabled and enabled multiple PCI delayed transactions, all seem to have little effect.

Finally I decided to wave goodbye to Dell's firmware. LSI has it down as a MegaRAID 493 elite 1600, so I flashed it with their latest firmware. Doesn't seem to have helped either though.

Has anybody else used this card in the past? I'm wondering if this is a driver issue, or if the card is and always was just crap? If so I'll proabably try sw raid on it instead.

Any thoughts?

Glyn