OS2 World Community Forum

OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical => Hardware => Topic started by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 29, 2020, 03:53:58 am

Title: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 29, 2020, 03:53:58 am
The other thread about building an OS/2 hardware system got me thinking about where the current hardware I have could use a little "help".

All in all I have a working system, but as I toss the occasional upgrade at it here and there, the original foundational pieces are starting to show their age.

Case in point, the MSI motherboard (880G-E45) only has a SATA2 controller. A couple of years ago I installed a Samsung 850 Evo SSD and completely moved away from a HPFS386 setup to JFS. Working fine, no issues. But since 850 Evo is SATA3 capable I haven't really had the chance to benefit from that capability.

All the numerous arguments around whether a typical home user would benefit or not aside, the point is clear: SATA3 is faster than SATA2.

So I'm curious, has anyone attempted to use a PCIe SATA3 add-on controller card? If so, what chipset did you find supported on our platform, and was that in standard SATA or AHCI mode?

Here is the current output of SysBench for my 850 Evo SSD:

Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 1-2: 238473 MB - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      125.379    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      228.815    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      231.438    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      217.636    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      225.963    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        2.830    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

...and here is the output of DiskIO for the same drive:

Code: [Select]
DISKIO - Fixed Disk Benchmark, Version 1.18z
(C) 1994-1998 Kai Uwe Rommel
(C) 2004 madded2

Number of fixed disks: 6
Number of CD-ROM drives: 1

Dhrystone 2.1 C benchmark routines (C) 1988 Reinhold P. Weicker
Dhrystone benchmark for this CPU: 4327544 runs/sec

Hard disk 2: 255 sides, 30401 cylinders, 63 sectors per track = 238472 MB
Drive cache/bus transfer rate: 114199 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 0   : 205139 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 30399: 192094 k/sec
CPU usage by full speed disk transfers: 23%
Average data access time: Disk read error.
Multithreaded disk I/O (4 threads): 118139 k/sec, 14% CPU usage


Thanks!
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Pete on March 29, 2020, 06:14:23 am
Hi Dariusz

You may be on a "suck it and see" with this question...

i have not needed to investigate this myself but a quick look at a few options on ebay suggests that no special driver is required for windows - no drivers mentioned in ads.

So, I would expect it to work with os2ahci, possibly with a(some) command line switch(es) to get driver to recognise and work with adapter.


Have fun  :-)

Pete
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dave Yeo on March 29, 2020, 06:30:16 am
The problem you likely will run into is that your computer probably only has PCI-E v2, so even with a SATA 3 contrloller, your speed will be limited to SATA 2 speeds.
I ran into the same issue, and picked up a cheap used computer that does have 2 SATA 3 controllers (and 2 SATA 2).
While it did really speed up the SSD, it is a cheap Kingston and even on SATA 3, performs worse then yours.
Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 0-2: 228934 MB - KINGSTON SA400S37240G
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      122.595    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      120.709    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      219.430    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      206.746    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      182.295    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        5.430    percent
   ---------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 29, 2020, 04:48:46 pm
Hey Dave!

The problem you likely will run into is that your computer probably only has PCI-E v2, so even with a SATA 3 contrloller, your speed will be limited to SATA 2 speeds...

So I tried to anticipate this by investigating the PCI-E specs prior to going down the add-on card road. Based on what I have read up the PCI-E v2 x1 (x1 = single lane) supports up to 500 MB/sec throughput. Given that number and let's say taking about 10% off due to overhead I'd still be potentially up to that 450 MB/sec rate, which while a bit lower than the theoretical SATA3 of 600 MB/sec is still a good bump from where I am today, especially given that only a SINGLE SSD would be connected to that add-on controller card. The HDDs would still stay on the motherboard's SATA2 controller.

The motherboard restriction of course leaves out the possibility of going down the PCI-E x4 route, but one could certainly do that and there are plenty of add-on cards out there that support this as well.

You know, given that most of the cards I found so far are right around that $30-$40 mark, I'm actually contemplating picking up a used MSI motherboard (still within the same product family as what I'm running right now, down to the NIC and audio chipsets - so perhaps working right out-of-the-box).

Was thinking about something like https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/890FXAGD65/Specification (https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/890FXAGD65/Specification)

Ahh...crazy eh?

EDIT
====
In case anyone is looking for a decent PCIe explain, here are a good couple of sites:

1) Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)

2) HardwareSecretes
https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-pci-express/ (https://www.hardwaresecrets.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-pci-express/)
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Neil Waldhauer on March 29, 2020, 05:12:46 pm
This is from my http://www.blondeguy.com/computer/humbopeep.html (http://www.blondeguy.com/computer/humbopeep.html) machine, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720s.

Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 0-1: 122103 MB - SAMSUNG MZ7LN128HAHQ-000L1
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      150.091    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      406.492    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :       30.211    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      407.783    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      281.495    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        9.480    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

By the way, we are all showing that failure of the Avg. data access time test. How hard would it be to fix SysBench so that test doesn't fail and a Disk I/O-marks score could be created?

I'd post another machine, but it looks like SysBench crashed. I looked on the Lenovo website, and SATA is going away fast. You can still order a machine with a SATA drive, but by default, none seem to have it.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 29, 2020, 05:31:15 pm
Hi Pete,

...So, I would expect it to work with os2ahci, possibly with a(some) command line switch(es) to get driver to recognise and work with adapter...

Do you know if any specials steps are required to make a move from the traditional SATA to AHCI use on our OS/2 platform?

So I thought I read before that in order to use AHCI one actually has to re-format the drive itself, etc, etc...is that the case?
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dave Yeo on March 29, 2020, 07:04:57 pm
Hi Dariusz, switching to AHCI is as easy as enabling it in your Bios and loading the driver.
Yes, it seems using more lanes if you can would speed things up.
@Neil, I don't think we have the source code for sysbench and Trevor hasn't been around for a while.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: ivan on March 29, 2020, 09:48:58 pm
Hi Dariusz,

Can I convert you to the idea of building a nice new AMD Ryzen based computer?  It might get round all your problems.


BTW My Disk i/o for a non SSD drive is attached
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dave Yeo on March 29, 2020, 09:58:46 pm
I get similar numbers for my fastest spinning drive,
Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 0-1: 953855 MB - WDC WD10EZEX-75M2NA0
   Avg. data access time :       15.500    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      296.543    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      175.897    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      148.977    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :       84.567    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      136.480    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        2.860    percent
   ---------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      802.310    Disk I/O-marks

But in real world usage, I can compile Mozilla almost 15% faster on the slow SDD.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Pete on March 29, 2020, 09:59:02 pm
Hi Dariusz

You are switching disk driver not file system driver so do not need to reformat.

How much you pay for a card seems to depend on how many sata3 ports you want - 2 port cards look fairly inexpensive eg https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PCI-E-2-0-PCI-Express-to-SATA-3-0-2-Port-Expansion-Controller-Adapter-Card-6Gbps/352922289234?hash=item522bcec452:g:DRsAAOSwoZZeey5g&autorefresh=true

Check [BootDrive]:\sys\doc\AHCI\README.TXT for details of switches.


Regards

Pete


Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: ivan on March 30, 2020, 12:28:27 am
Hi Dave,

Maybe I should consider using the SDD drive I got a couple of years ago for a notebook but ended up never using.  Might be interesting to see just how fast the boot info scrolls up the screen - at the moment it is too fast to read.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 30, 2020, 12:41:03 am
All in all you guys here are all the disks I'm currently dealing with:

1) SSD - Samsung Evo 850
2) HDD - WD VelociRaptor 10K RPM (WDC WD3000HLFS-01G6U0)
3) HDD - WD Caviar Blue 7200 RPM (WDC WD5000AAKS-00V1A0)

Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 1-2: 238473 MB - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      140.779    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      214.527    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      224.304    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      209.764    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      216.198    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       18.430    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

 Disk I/O disk 2-3: 286166 MB - WD3000HLFS-01G6U0
   Avg. data access time :        6.900    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      219.546    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      121.100    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      106.410    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :       74.197    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      100.569    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       16.530    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      564.284    Disk I/O-marks

 Disk I/O disk 2-4: 476938 MB - WD5000AAKS-00V1A0
   Avg. data access time :       14.700    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      188.920    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      128.601    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      109.896    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :       60.913    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :       99.803    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       16.850    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :      552.953    Disk I/O-marks

I will tell you this, where the VelociRaptor made a real dent, the SSD really took things to the next level.

The key here is the access time, this is what provides for a more responsive system feeling, and when coupled with a high and sustained xfer rate will give you a machine that just flat-out seems to load things quick and you never have to "wait for the drive".
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on March 30, 2020, 12:54:34 am
Hey Ivan,

...Can I convert you to the idea of building a nice new AMD Ryzen based computer?  It might get round all your problems...

No need to, I've been a convert all my PC life actually - seriously, starting way back when the Intel 8086 4.77 MHz was yanked and replaced with the 10 MHz AMD CPU. But I wish I could take the Ryzen plunge for our platform, and while I've read about your success in the past, for now I'm still going to wait a tad more for AOS to complete their enhancements.

Having said that, my son's machine (heavy into graphics processing) is a Ryzen7 2700X box, Samsung 970 Pro 512Gig M.2 NVMe drive, 32G RAM, the machine is a BEAST!!!
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dave Yeo on March 30, 2020, 12:59:20 am
Hi Ivan, boot isn't that much faster with most of the time checking the various partitions, including one slow drive. Things like SeaMonkey starting up are noticeably faster. Worth trying.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on April 03, 2020, 08:12:54 pm
Quick update for you guys.

So off I went at least tryig to get the AHCI part working for me. All three storage devices (1 SSD and 2 HDDs) support NCQ, so why not at least try to take advantage of it, right?

The only point to note here is very specific to my hardware: booting up with AHCI driver enabled caused my otherwise "orderly" arrangement of devices to get jumbled a bit...basically the DVD player got tossed onto a AHCI port while one of the HDDs remained on the SATA/IDE controller.

The above situation cause the following ahci.log entry to be created:

Code: [Select]
Adapter 0: PCI=0:17:0 ID=1002:4390 AMD SB700/800 irq=22 addr=0xfe8ffc00 version=10100
  Port 0:
    Drive 0: 30401 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors per track (238472MB) (LVM)
             Model: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB             
  Port 1:
    Drive 0: 36481 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors per track (286165MB) (LVM)
             Model: WDC WD3000HLFS-01G6U0                 
  Port 2:
    No drive present
  Port 3:
    Drive 0: atapi removable
             Model: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22NS50               
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port
...

with multiple "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" messages being posted.

I figured this must have been due to the ATAPI device being on that AHCI port, and despite the fact that the AHCI readme implies that's OK to do (although some audio CD functionality may be lost) I did not understand the meaning of this message. For all I know this is maybe caused by lack of CD/DVD media being present in the drive itself, I did not test that.

Anyways, I re-wired which ports my storage devices were connected to on the motherboard. This allowed me to toss all the NCQ supporting drives on the AHCI controller and relegate the ATAPI device to the good ol' SATA/IDE controller being driven by DANI drivers.

Things appear to be working. Quick re-test showed a tiny increase in throughput with the biggest difference being the CPU utilization drop from about 20-25% to about 3-5% on the AHCI setup. This makes sense if I correctly understood one of the advantages of AHCI setup, which is the offloading of the scheduling and transmission of the command protocol from the CPU onto the device controller.

As a side note, I am curious why my SSD cache/bus transfer is so poor? Not related to the AHCI change, must be something different because it certainly is strange that it's actually slower than the HDDs.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: David McKenna on April 03, 2020, 09:45:56 pm
 Try turning OFF NCQ on the SSD drive. I get better SSD drive performance on my machine that way....
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on April 06, 2020, 12:17:53 am
Hi David,

Try turning OFF NCQ on the SSD drive. I get better SSD drive performance on my machine that way....

Thanks for the suggestion. I did try this approach, but the results actually stayed the same, and these roughly match the throughput I was seeing with DANIS506 drivers with only about 15% improvement overall.

I tried a few other things, such as re-routing the SSD to another port on that AHCI adapter, that did not impact the results.

I then went back to some of my old testing results and noticed a following remark I had made in the SysBench output logs:

"Throughput went up with the use of Dani /PF:3 timing controller settings"

STANDARD TIMING
Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 1-2: 238473 MB - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      125.379    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      228.815    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      231.438    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      217.636    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      225.963    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        2.830    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

REDUCED TIMING
Code: [Select]
Disk I/O disk 1-2: 238473 MB - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      162.474    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      231.584    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      231.628    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      218.996    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      227.403    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :        2.920    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

So it is interesting to note that with the IDE DANIS506 driver's reduced timing mode the cache/bux xfer improved by some 29%.

I do not see any such specifications in the OS2AHCI driver though, although there is a reference there to 'Link Speed' and by default this is set to 'maximum'. Grrh...so little explanation in the drivers docs, or the wiki...can't hurt to test it out though I suppose.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: David McKenna on April 06, 2020, 12:52:37 am
 Dariusz,

 I was surprised to get better performance by turning off NCQ when I did it, so who knows?... might as well try different 'Link Speed' settings and see if anything crops up...

Regards,
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on April 06, 2020, 03:22:10 pm
David, everyone...

... might as well try different 'Link Speed' settings and see if anything crops up...
Regards,

So, here is literally the quote from the OS2AHCI driver doc file:

Code: [Select]
/LS                    Set link speed (default = 0):
                         0 = maximum,
                         1 = limit to generation 1
                         2 = limit to generation 2
                         3 = limit to generation 3

So at first I figured OK, 1 = SATA1, 2 = SATA2 and 3 = SATA3, although given where the standard is today I'm not quite sure how to interpret 0 =...???

Given that my motherboard is SATA2 capable only I enabled /LS:2, that resulted in a tiny throughput increase to get me to 158MB/s. I then tried both /LS:1 (which gave me 90MB/s) and /LS:3 (which gave me about 100MB/s).

So much for that theory. Keep in mind, each change required a re-boot, so things are pretty clean coming back up, unless there is some other register setting somewhere that a soft re-boot does not clear, could be...

Meanwhile, the DANIS506 section I'm comparing it to is this:

Code: [Select]
1) Register access delay:
0 : 1000 ns  (default, fixed for all non-PCI systems)
1 :  500 ns
2 :  250 ns
3 : no delay (works on most systems, check out yourself)

I might toss a ticket in for this but I honestly would not expect anything out of it.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Pete on April 06, 2020, 08:49:13 pm
Hi Dariusz

Which build of os2ahci.add are you using? - the "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" is indicative of the flaky v2.03 driver supplied with ArcaOS5.0.1/5.0.2.

If I am right it could be worth trying either a later driver or the 1.32 build from eCS.


Regards

Pete
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on April 06, 2020, 10:45:08 pm
Hey Pete,

...Which build of os2ahci.add are you using? - the "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" is indicative of the flaky v2.03 driver supplied with ArcaOS5.0.1/5.0.2...
Pete

2.07 from the AOS d/l section.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Doug Bissett on April 06, 2020, 11:01:17 pm
Quote
Which build of os2ahci.add are you using? - the "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" is indicative of the flaky v2.03 driver supplied with ArcaOS5.0.1/5.0.2.

The latest available (with Arca Noae subscription) is v2.07. The "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" is not an indication of a flaky driver. It is an indication of cheap hardware, that takes it's time initializing. Ignore that. It only happens at boot time.

Quote
So at first I figured OK, 1 = SATA1, 2 = SATA2 and 3 = SATA3, although given where the standard is today I'm not quite sure how to interpret 0 =...???

0 is exactly what it says "fastest" that the hardware is capable of. If your machine supports SATA2, that is probably as fast as it will go. You would only use the other numbers if you have a flaky disk, or a flaky controller. Remember that this is the speed that data flows between the controller, and the device. The device should have a cache, so that is where the data goes, waiting for the hardware to put it to the "disk". An SSD introduces a bunch of variables, that can affect device speed especially when writing (search for the SSD Wiki). Reading is a whole different thing. I don't know if the disk cache is actually used for read.

Os2ahci has two parameters, that I use. One is /n (NCQ), which is useful when the drive needs to move heads to get to data. I don't have a SSD, but I would expect that this setting would not be appropriate for an SSD. The other is /f which enables the device cache (with a whole bunch of words around it). I would think that you would want to use /f. You may want to set these for individual drives, if you have spinning disks, as well as the SSD.

Also, remember that the software cache can affect measurements.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on April 07, 2020, 05:27:15 pm
Hey Doug!

The latest available (with Arca Noae subscription) is v2.07. The "port #3 interrupt error status: 0x40000001; restarting port" is not an indication of a flaky driver. It is an indication of cheap hardware, that takes it's time initializing. Ignore that. It only happens at boot time.

When I had the DVD drive hooked up to the AHCI port I saw these messages getting posted to the log. In other words, executing multiple 'copy os2ahci$ ahci.log' caused new warnings to show up. Anyways, as I stated earlier on in this thread the issue is resolved by moving the DVD off of the AHCI port.

Quote
So at first I figured OK, 1 = SATA1, 2 = SATA2 and 3 = SATA3, although given where the standard is today I'm not quite sure how to interpret 0 =...???

0 is exactly what it says "fastest" that the hardware is capable of. If your machine supports SATA2, that is probably as fast as it will go...An SSD introduces a bunch of variables, that can affect device speed especially when writing (search for the SSD Wiki)...

So as I previously posted, the problem I have here is that the AHCI controller results are poorer than the comparable IDE results. That appears to be at least partially driven by different optimization/settings the AHCI driver settles on. In this case the default '0 = maximum' setting is clearly slower than the matching DANIS506 settings on that very same device. Which means that the device/bus interface itself is capable of higher throughput BUT with AHCI drivers it is unable to achieve this result.

...Os2ahci has two parameters, that I use. One is /n (NCQ), which is useful when the drive needs to move heads to get to data. I don't have a SSD, but I would expect that this setting would not be appropriate for an SSD...

I do in fact use that on my SSD, the reason being that with SSDs in particular this allows the SSD controller to figure out the best command distribution for the various read/write requests. Without the NCQ being enabled this is strictly driven by the sequential nature of the commands being passed to the SSD from the OS, and in that case our poor ol' OS knows nothing about SSD capabilities.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Doug Bissett on April 07, 2020, 05:59:24 pm
Quote
So as I previously posted, the problem I have here is that the AHCI controller results are poorer than the comparable IDE results. That appears to be at least partially driven by different optimization/settings the AHCI driver settles on. In this case the default '0 = maximum' setting is clearly slower than the matching DANIS506 settings on that very same device. Which means that the device/bus interface itself is capable of higher throughput BUT with AHCI drivers it is unable to achieve this result.

You may have an AHCI controller, that is going south (or isn't SSD friendly). If IDE is better, use it.
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on July 12, 2020, 04:04:46 pm
Folks!

A quick follow-up on my part regarding this. So I took some time to spot a reasonably priced SATA3 PCI-E add-on card, less than $10. Took a while longer to actully receive it, yup all the way from China..lol.

Anyways, the point is it runs the HighPoint Rocket 620 firmware and it is a Marvell chipset (PCI ID 9125).

In order to get my OS/2 box to even boot I had to remove the following snoopers (nearly everything that was in the SNOOP.LST file):
ipsraid.snip
pcmci.snp
netdet2.snp
parallel.snp
mouse.snp
serial.snp
pcibus.snp

...but at least that got me to a booting OS/2 box where the main drive (boot drive only) was hooked up to that SATA3 card.

So what are the results????

Well, here is a quick BEFORE & AFTER:

1) BEFORE, this is the SATA2 controller on my motherboard
Code: [Select]
Hard disk 2: 255 sides, 30401 cylinders, 63 sectors per track = 238472 MB
Drive cache/bus transfer rate: 119363 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 0   : -208938 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 30399: 198222 k/sec
CPU usage by full speed disk transfers: 22%
Average data access time: Disk read error.
Multithreaded disk I/O (4 threads): 113654 k/sec, 28% CPU usage

2) AFTER, this is the SATA3 controller on the adapter card
Code: [Select]
Hard disk 4: 255 sides, 30401 cylinders, 63 sectors per track = 238472 MB
Drive cache/bus transfer rate: 117574 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 0   : 171576 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 30399: 167781 k/sec
CPU usage by full speed disk transfers: 3%
Average data access time: Disk read error.
Multithreaded disk I/O (4 threads): 107815 k/sec, 3% CPU usage

So certainly on this hardware alone the built-in stuff is better, even with the 28% CPU utilization on the Multithreaded test (plenty of CPU power here).

OK, that's all, just wanted to give everyone else some real concrete BEFORE & AFTER metrics.

Cheers al!
Title: Re: PCIe - SATA3 card choices?
Post by: Dariusz Piatkowski on November 18, 2020, 04:29:47 pm
So I figured a final (most likely) update re: how the underlying hardware platform impacts the final performance. Yeah, I mean we all know and get it, but in my case I have now tested 3 separate hardware solutions so it's kind of neat to see the difference (or lack thereof).

Anyways, without further ado, I now have the MSI 890FXA-GD70 board up and running...ha ha..."upgrade" eh? Well, it's ancient history by today's hardware standard; yes, the Ryzen stuff is still out there, but if you recall I was looking to max out the performance of my Samsung 850 SSD, and it being a SATA3 drive and being held-back by my SATA2 interface on the previous motherboard clearly wasn't allowing me to do so.

So the new board sports a SATA3 interface, it also finally lets me boot my Phenom II X6 CPU with the full 6-cores up and running (separate post on that b/c I'm seeing continuous CPU spikes).

1) SysBench results for the SSD
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Disk I/O disk 0-2: 238473 MB - WSamsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
   Avg. data access time :       --.---    milliseconds
   Cache/Bus xfer rate   :      206.859    Megabytes/second
   Track 0 xfer rate fwd :      387.066    Megabytes/second
   Middle trk rate fwds. :      392.029    Megabytes/second
   Last track rate bwds. :      369.462    Megabytes/second
   Average Transfer rate :      382.853    Megabytes/second
   Disk use CPU load     :       14.320    percent
   -----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Total                 :       --.---    Disk I/O-marks

2) diskio results
Code: [Select]
DISKIO - Fixed Disk Benchmark, Version 1.18z
(C) 1994-1998 Kai Uwe Rommel
(C) 2004 madded2

Number of fixed disks: 6
Number of CD-ROM drives: 1

Dhrystone 2.1 C benchmark routines (C) 1988 Reinhold P. Weicker
Dhrystone benchmark for this CPU: 3060618 runs/sec

Hard disk 2: 255 sides, 30401 cylinders, 63 sectors per track = 238472 MB
Drive cache/bus transfer rate: 130038 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 0   : -105937 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 30399: -128616 k/sec
CPU usage by full speed disk transfers: 38%
Average data access time: Disk read error.
Multithreaded disk I/O (4 threads): Disk read error.
3 k/sec, 27% CPU usage

So diskio is a little off (problems with the hardware speed I think), but SysBench does show some clear improvement. I think the results are in-line with what one might expect from a SATA2 to SATA3 move for a storage device that is capable of utilizing that speed.