Interesting Windows Server 2012 LSI SAS2308 Controller Results

[Patrick]

Working on the first five drive benchmarks for this week. Seeing some really interesting things testing on the LSI SAS2308. Drives are seeing low performance. Pretty darn cool to see this kind of result.

Each drive is hanging off of the IR mode LSI SAS2308 but is not part of a RAID group. Basically they just show up in Storage Manager as single drives. OK. Driver version is 2.0.55.84. How bad? Here are a few results:

SanDisk Extreme 240GB

Samsung 840 Pro 256GB

OCZ Vertex 4 256GB

Yea... that bad. Trying the LSI SAS 2308 LSI driver off of the Supermicro ftp v2.00.58

Stay tuned... If anyone else has thoughts on the write performance, let me know. A bit tired today so certainly not thinking on top of my game right now.

UPDATE: Seems like the same performance with the Supermicro LSI drivers. 1689 total score for example with the SanDisk Extreme 240GB.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Disk Cache off ?
Rebooting after doing anything to drives ?

Driver will have little effect on the results I would think, something is majorly wrong with the writes

 

[Patrick]

I think it is IR mode vs IT mode. Trying to flash. sas2flsh.exe is giving me the PAL error. Trying to go uefi but USB drive is mapped as a blk7 instead of fs0... not sure why. Can change to the blkX devices but not able to cd into the directory. Even tried using the DOS LiveCD.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Shouldn't make any difference really IR or IT mode, just make the drive 'Unconfigured Good'
I get very little difference between the 2 modes.

 

[Patrick]

Shouldn't make any difference really IR or IT mode, just make the drive 'Unconfigured Good'
I get very little difference between the 2 modes.

I just want to try this... megarec cannot find the controller... sas2flsh can find it but PAL error. Argh.

Need USB to work in UEFI so I can try that and get around PAL.

 

[Patrick]

Crossing fingers... USB drive #6 worked (Micro SDHC card -> SD -> USB adapter)

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6 worked
sas2flash.efi -o -f 9207-8.bin worked
sas2flash.efi -o -b mptsas2.rom worked

... here we go

 

[mobilenvidia]

Megarec is getting old, doesn't work on SAS2208 either.

Grab a more SAS2flash friendly mobo, I use my ASRock P55 just for this on purpose.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Crossing fingers... USB drive #6 worked (Micro SDHC card -> SD -> USB adapter)

sas2flash.efi -o -e 6 worked
sas2flash.efi -o -f 9207-8.bin worked
sas2flash.efi -o -b mptsas2.rom worked

... here we go

Don't need the mptAS2.rom in IT mode, as it's the BIOS which you try and get away from in IT mode

 

[Patrick]

Good point. Was just playing around though.

So interesting note... post flash... 1794.54 Total for the SanDisk Extreme 240GB.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Did you boot to windows let it find the drives the rebooted again ?

 

[mobilenvidia]

Disable Writecaching in Device manager !! untick everything.

When I enable = terrible write scores (like yours)

 

[mobilenvidia]

Also just found in Device manager:

Write Cache off, Write cache flushing on (unticked) = Fast writes
Write Cache on, Write cache flushing on (unticked) = Poor writes
Write Cache on, Write cache flushing off (ticked) = fast writes

So good to have UEFI boots in to Win8, quick turn arounds in testing

 

[Patrick]

Looks like unticked-unticked did better. Surprisingly, still not as fast as the Intel controller results. I was hoping with a fast processor and a PCIe 3.0 x8 connection, these would go fast.

 

[mobilenvidia]

My vernerable Async Solid 3 gets better write results on the M1015 in IR mode.

Something is afoot.

Writecache on, Buffer flush on (unticked)

Writecache on Buffer flush off (both ticked)

 

[Patrick]

Not totally sold on this. The Samsung 830 and 840 Pro 256GB drives are failing to hit 10MB/s at 4K QD4 and both have write scores sub 500.

 

[Patrick]

WHOA! The plot thickens Pieter... that trick only works for SandForce SSDs. Vertex 4 and Samsung drives to not benefit from deselecting that box.

 

[mobilenvidia]

The same old venerable Single solid 3 on the IBM M5016 in single RAID0.
Now has same performance as Samsung 840 Pro with reads
What would the 840 Pro do on SAS2208 controller ?

 

[dba]

Working on the first five drive benchmarks for this week. Seeing some really interesting things testing on the LSI SAS2308. Drives are seeing low performance. Pretty darn cool to see this kind of result.

...

Hi Patrick,

Something is definitely wrong. I'd try a different benchmark tool - probably my old standby IOMeter - to see if the results are consistent across tools before diving in to other diagnostics.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Does the SAS2308 have a link speed option in the BIOS like the SAS2208 does.
Not present in SAS2008/2108

 

[Patrick]

Hi Patrick,

Something is definitely wrong. I'd try a different benchmark tool - probably my old standby IOMeter - to see if the results are consistent across tools before diving in to other diagnostics.

Just tried AS SSD after installing .NET framework 3.5. Same result on the Samsung 830 and 840 Pro. 2.2MB/s 4K writes.

Also... I tried a Vertex 1 128GB. 12MB/s 4K writes on the LSI controller. Wonder if it is something Samsung related?