Dismal performance with X25-M 80GB drives on a 3Ware 9690SA controller

[LinusTech]

Well, my SSDs arrived yesterday, and I got them all mounted up





I really wanted to benchmark the heck out of them before I actually load on my OS, and once I enabled write back cache I'm getting numbers on the ICH10R controller that are about what I expect (maxes out at 630MB/s read with 3 drives, and 4 doesn't help, then maxes out around 300MB/s write with 4 drives).

The 3Ware 9690SA-4I on the other hand is giving me absolutely horrible numbers. With two drives I'm getting very inconsistent reads (it wavers up and down constantly from about 200MB/s to 150MB/s).

Is there a setting for the 3Ware card that I should be enabling that is similar to write back cache? Here is the configuration of the drives in TW_CLI



Here's performance on the 3Ware card. 2 drives, 64k stripe size:

Here's performance with the same settings on the ICH10R: