The Random Ramblings of a Sysadmin

Every few years I come across one of the little boxen, and every time I face the same issue. I can clearly remember that the RAID is slow for a reason, just not which reason. This posting is intended to save me from spending time on google in a few years... The Dell PowerEdge SC440 is a nice little Xeon-based tower server featuring a SAS 5/iR RAID controller. The sluggish writes are due to the default disabling of write cache on the controller, which is just fine for making sure data are not lost if the power fails, but which also drags performance down to ridiculous levels.