Dell Perc H310 + 7x 3TB 7200RPM = only 400-450MB/s?

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John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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Hi all,

I build myself a new/used workstation based on 2 E5-2680V2's.

I'm experimenting with a spare dell H310 I have laying around as backup for my freenas server which uses 3 of those cards.

I'm only getting 400-350 MB/s with 8 disks in raid 0. (I'm experimenting).

Coming from the world of ZFS this is extremely poor performance for the amount of disks. I would expect 700-800 MB/s.

Is this due to the controller? Any ideas if this controller performs poorly on windows or something? I flashed it back to IR mode because I wanted to experiment with hardware raid.

When using the disks in passtrough I get slightly better performance on windows 10 software raid.

I had an areca 1222 card in my pervious workstation. With just 4 disks I could get 350 MB/s. And this was a 3Gbps card...

This is the driver I'm using in windows 10: Capture-1.PNG Capture-2.PNG

Any advice would be appreciated!
 

Anthony A

New Member
Apr 12, 2018
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H310 is a LSI2008 Controller. Its quite old. you might be maxing out what it can handle.

What drives are you using? a
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Shouldn't be anywhere near the maximum of a SAS2008; you should easily be able to get >500MB/s seq reads out of a 7-drive array without issue.

No experience with using the IR mode myself, but I assume the card isn't plugged into a PCIe slot that might be limiting it?
 
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K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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No experience with using the IR mode myself, but I assume the card isn't plugged into a PCIe slot that might be limiting it?

Coincidentally, today I was investigating why a new 16 S3700 array was performing poorly and found that one LSI 3008 card was connected to a Pcie x2 slot :confused:.
 

John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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Hi, did some more research and apparently the percH310 has terrible performance because it has only a Qdepth of 25 or something. Also it has no write cache and it disables the cache of the drives that are attached.

That is why the controller gets so many terrible reviews...

I guess it is fine to miss those things if you use IT mode and let ZFS handle all these things but as a normal raid controller it is very bad. Was hoping IR mode with pass trough would be ok but as soon as you use the controller itself it shows its native dell performance...
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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If you flash a H310 to stock LSI v19/20 IT mode firmware the queue depth is 600. Just saying, I use a slew of these in ESXi 6.5 boxes w/out perf issue pass-thru vt-D to FreeNAS.
 
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John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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True I got 6 of them in IT mode as well. But I needed the one in IR mode for windows and I'm not about to trust the windows software raid in IT mode... i tried to get it to stock IR firmware from LSI but didn't have much luck there.

Never used a raid card in windows but the driver support from areca is very good. It reports straight to the OS about changes to the raid array. Also like the fact that you can set things up from the web browser. Don't know the LSI or PERC cards that well but it's nice to manage and diagnose things without having to reboot etc;...
 

sinisterDei

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Mar 25, 2018
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Don't know the LSI or PERC cards that well
For both types (since they're both LSI cards underneath) you can install the MegaRAID Storage Manager software, and it'll give you full control of the RAID array from within Windows, as well as provide alerting and such.