I'm getting 8-15 MB/s write on a Parity space, that can't be right can it? Can CPU power affect the performance?
See bellow for my findings on the fix.
Server 2012, with inbox drivers, and storage spaces, and the drives never went to sleep.
Yeah just as I suspected ATA_SLEEP still isn't being passed from O/S through a SCSI device driver, something I'd hoped would change in Server2012/Win8. It's enough of a grey area that I'm not sure if the problem is actually on MS's end or LSI's end or both.
Which leaves your raid controller to manage sleep/spindown, and AFAIK, LSI removed the "dimmer switch" feature from latest drivers.
Nope.
Ok, background first. I have a bloody Norco (the shit I have with having fix my backplanes has left a dirty taste) 4224 running a GA-X38-DS5, 4GB RAM and a small C2D CPU. In the board, I have a pair of M1015's, LSI IT flashed. These hold 16 drives (8 Seagate 2TB greens, 8 ST3000DM001 3TB's) and the other 8 SATA-II ports bring up the other bays. I have modded the PCI-e x1 slot at top to hold a baby GPU card as the boards get shirty without a video card.
Now for the OS, I have run both Server 2012 and Win8 for which I have settled on as suits my needs better. I am not a fan in any other the excess network BS M$ has plagued windows since Vista onwards, and S2012 was the pits. Half my devices just refused the shares outright while I pulled my hair doing simple things like trying the get the NIC seen a Private rather than bloody public (firewall shits me even more). Win8 does the job fine after some tweaking and killing of the hidden default shares.
Storage Spaces:
4x 2TB Seagate PARITY
4x 2TB Seagate PARITY
4x 3TB Seagate PARITY
4x 3TB Seagate PARITY
I have a 4x 500GB HDD RAID-10 array that runs off the on-board ICH9R (these are great little chipsets) and this is for fast read/writes while hold faster I/O.
The read speeds are to be expected (400+ MB/sec) but the writes were about 10MB/sec. I have since found a simple command line to be run in Admin PowerShell that allows for faster writes.
Code:
Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName <Storage Pool Name> -IsPowerProtected $True
<Storage Pool Name> = the Pools simple name, remove the < >
I now see an average of 60MB/sec which is still not the 100+ I would like but it more than fine for media serving.
I have experimented with simple and mirrored array but they were obscure or ordinary as well. Still have not found a RAID-0 option yet that gives summed write speeds (I want RAID-0 arrays for when I host or go to LAN parties)