AOC-S3108L-H8iR issues please help

[Robert Hart]

Hi All,

First post on here and I'm losing my mind.

I've built my own NAS server (ish) and although it runs fine im unhappy with the performance of the HDD speeds im getting and unsure what to do to get it sorted.

System details as follow
Supermicro X10SRi-F
Xeon x5 2620 v3
32GB
Supermincro AOC-S3108L-H8iR with Mini SAS HD - SATA breakout cables
6 x 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS
2 x 64GB SATA DOM HDD for OS
Windows 7 64bit

I originally had the drives setup in a RAID 10 with 4 drives and the other two in a RAID 1 my transfer speeds between drives was poor and even over the network, generally less than 90MB/s. I now have the drives setup in 3 seperate 2 drive RAID 0 Virtual Drives. As we speak i am moving 500GB of data between two of the Virtual Drives and im currently transferring at 81MB/s and dropping. Now, on my old desktop machine if i moved files between two hard drives running off of a desktop mobo i could easily get about 125MB/s so why i am getting such poor speeds from drives setup in a stripe array using an expensive RAID card on a high spec machine??

Also, my temps always show around 70c which cant be good, is this right? my case is well ventilated and the rest of my temps are around the mid 20c

Lastly i bought a cachevault kit BTR-TFM8G-LSICVM02 but do i really need it? will it boost performance or is just a safe guard for power failures

I would be so grateful for any help, im seriously losing my patience with my setup.

Thanks in advance

 

[Robert Hart]

I updated the firmware using the file on the LSI/Avago website from the MegaRAID 9361-8i page as this seems to be identical to my card, would this be causing the problem?

 

[Robert Hart]

lastly, should i change the RAID card to something else? i bought the best card i could because i didn't really want to have to upgrade again but if something else is going to be more reliable and give me better speeds than id rather spend the money now whilst i can. Thanks again

 

[Kristian]

@Robert Hart

I have the LSI 9361-8i

I bought a slot fan to cool the chip down:
TTC-SC07TZ VGA-KUEHLER MIT 2X LUEFTER: Amazon.de: Elektronik

It is still running at 62°C = 143Fahrenheit

I have a cache vault attached to my card.

your speeds are not "normal"
I have a RAID 6 array of
7x 4TB Wed Red and
1x HGST Deskstar NAS 4TB

When copying large files I see speeds between 500-700 MB/s

Is there background initialization, patrol read or consistency check going on?

what are your virtual drive propertys?

 

[Kristian]

Try:
Write policy: Write back with BBU
Read policy: No read ahead
IO policy: Direct IO
Access policy: read write
Disk cache policy: enabled
baclground initialization: enabled

 

[Robert Hart]

I'll send screen shot in the morning, making the other half a bit p'd off as been at this all day. Thanks for reply though. At least I know my temps are relatively ok.

 

[Robert Hart]

Have uploaded screenshots of my VD's. When i used to have the cachvault installed when the machine booted it would always say cachvault mismatch. If the CacheVault will give better performance then i will stick it back in and show the error message it gives me. What are people using to test HDD performance? i used crytsaldisk mark and it was showing me some strange results so the only reliable result im seeing is from file transfer info within windows.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 4.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2015 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 5933.257 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 317.729 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 468.938 MB/s [114486.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.943 MB/s [ 718.5 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 4157.775 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 89.771 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 137.929 MB/s [ 33674.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.698 MB/s [ 170.4 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [J: 0.0% (0.3/7450.9 GiB)] (x3)
Date : 2015/05/03 8:55:56
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

 

[Robert Hart]

So i used ATTO before changing the settings and had some shocking results. the only setting I've really changed is the Disk cache policy: enabled and i seem to now have similar results to you. I'm now moving 5TB of data and its now averaging about 280MB/s, ill keep an eye on it and see if it drops but i think i may have finally got it sorted. Now its just a case of finding out if i need the CacheVault or not, any recommendations would be great.

Thanks

 

[Kristian]

Somebody correct me if I am telling nonsense:
I think the cachevault is just a "data protection thing".

Your controller has build in cache:
So if you experience a power outage the cache data is lost and that will ultimatly lead to a degraded or bad raid volume.
In order to prevent that: the cachevault saves the cached data and keeps it safe for up to 72h

If you power your system on the next time, cachevault will write the saved cache content to your disks and everything is good.

BTW: Perhaps it is worth considering to have one big virtual drive (I would suggest raid 5) out of your 3x raid 0 arrays.
Speed is probably better than now, because all your 6 disks can stripe the data.

 

[Robert Hart]

Thanks for all your help Kristian, I think your right in regards to the CacheVault, I'm purchasing a UPS very soon so power outage shouldn't be an issue really. Will check transfer speed in an hour and see if it's still around 280MB/s will be so glad to have it sorted. Thanks again.

 

[Kristian]

you are welcome. I am glad I could help

 

[Robert Hart]

Would you recommend raid 6 over raid 10 if I had all 6 drives as one?

 

[Kristian]

Well I have to be a bit cautios in giving recommendations, because I am realativly new to raid myself.
Before February I was pooling my HDDs with DriveBender and StableBit DrivePool... so my expertise is pretty thin.

The only true answer is: "Well... that depends..."

And it depends mostly on how important the data on your raid is...

source:
Adaptec - Which RAID Level is Right for Me?


RAID 10
Combines RAID 0 striping and RAID 1 mirroring. This level provides the improved performance of striping while still providing the redundancy of mirroring.

RAID 10 is the result of forming a RAID 0 array from two or more RAID 1 arrays. This RAID level provides fault tolerance - up to one disk of each sub-array may fail without causing loss of data.

Usable capacity of RAID 10 is 50% of available disk drives.

RAID 6 (Striping with dual parity)

Data is striped across several physical drives and dual parity is used to store and recover data. It tolerates the failure of two drives in an array, providing better fault tolerance than RAID 5. It also enables the use of more cost-effective ATA and SATA disks to storage business critical data.

This RAID level is similar to RAID 5, but includes a second parity scheme that is distributed across different drives and therefore offers extremely high fault tolerance and drivefailure tolerance. RAID 6 can withstand a double disk failure.

RAID 6 requires a minimum of four disks and a maximum of 16 disks to be implemented. Usable capacity is always 2 less than the number of available disk drives in the RAID set.

Note: With less expensive, but less reliable SATA disk drives in a configuration that employs RAID 6, it is possible to achieve a higher level of availability than a Fibre Channel Array using RAID 5. This is because the second parity drive in the RAID 6 RAID set can withstand a second failure during a rebuild. In a RAID 5 set, the degraded state and/or the rebuilding time onto a hot spare is considered the window at which the RAID array is most vulnerable to data loss. During this time, if a second disk failure occurs, data is unrecoverable. With RAID 6 there are no windows of vulnerability as the second parity drive protects against this.

So I choose Raid 6, because that leaves me with more available diskspace, because I don't have enough money to buy more disks

My data is pretty much non critical... and I can afford the longer downtimes when a rebuild should be needen.

Hope I could help

 

[Robert Hart]

Managed to get my temps down to 48c. think I might stick with raid 10, data isn't very critical but I think the benefits out weigh the data availability size sacrifice. Thanks again for your help.