Are Samsung 850 pros not LSI 9361-8i compatible?

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Cobraka

New Member
May 22, 2015
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I get very bad write performance with 4x 850 pro 250GB in Raid 10 and 2x 850 pro 1TB in Raid 1. It is also impossible to force enable the native disk write cache cause MegaSCU isnt working with the 9361-8i.

DirectIO, no read ahead + read/write-cache disabled. Drivers working fine.

Server specs:
2x Intel Xeon 2690 v3
Supermicro X10DAI
128GB DDR4 Samsung

Image 1 = Adaptec 8805 SSD disk write cache disabled.
Image 2 = Adaptec 8805 SSD disk write cache enabled.
Image 3 = LSI 9361-8i SSD disk write cache unchanged.

Any ideas? Thank you.
 

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Hank C

Active Member
Jun 16, 2014
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I have the same controller but have 840 pro. It has similar behavior. I did not know there are other ppl have the same thing too
 

Cobraka

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May 22, 2015
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Can you enable the disk write cache with the 840 pros? 840 pros are officially supported by LSI for the 9361-8i.
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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Performance of samsung in general tends to be lower on LSI controllers compared to Intel chipset.
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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I thought I remembered these Samsung falling flat on their face once their cache ran out... making them not the best choice for simultaneous multi-user access. Did that get resolved?
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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You mean I should ditch the LSI/Adaptec and go for the Intel C612 onboard raid?
So... The reason why PMC licensed the SA group from HP is because with the same PMC driven controllers.... HP hits 1m iops and Adaptec hits 100-200k iops.

So... Adaptec for SSD is not going to be good... and LSI has a known issue. I plan on doing...eventually a comparison for 3-4 drives across a variety of controllers.
 
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T_Minus

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What about the Intel branded LSI controllers, how's their firmware compare? Or, is not a factor?
 

Patriot

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What about the Intel branded LSI controllers, how's their firmware compare? Or, is not a factor?
I don't know... why don't you send me some to test. :p
Currently I have P420, P430, H240, H220 (hp lsi 92xx), Asus LSI 93xx ...
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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You have to enable disk cache policy for samsung drives to work with LSI megaraid. I've got over 10 in raid-1 on esxi using 9260/9271 megaraid controllers!

If you can't unblock the disk cache policy block, then you will not be able to enable the drive write cache policy!
 

Cobraka

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May 22, 2015
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You have to enable disk cache policy for samsung drives to work with LSI megaraid. I've got over 10 in raid-1 on esxi using 9260/9271 megaraid controllers!

If you can't unblock the disk cache policy block, then you will not be able to enable the drive write cache policy!
Well there is no easy way to do that with the 9361. You have to create the Raid then uninstall the raid card + hook up the SSDs to the onboard SATA. You can enable the SSD write cache using the samsung tools now and you need to do it for every single SSD used in the Raid. After that, reinstall the 9361 with the SSDs. The 9361 thinks its disabled but its not.

Maybe it helps someone but I would not recommend it.
 
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Ptery Siovsky

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Jun 10, 2015
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Hi Cobraka,

That is a big help! I ordered and paid for the 9361 together with 8 x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB for a RAID-10 Setup. How disappointing that this won't work out of the box. You would think that engineering companies like LSI with their endless supply of developers would be able to handle this rather easily. How big of a challenge is this really for this size of a company.

1) Anyways, so you had success with creating the raid array, then connecting all of the 4SSD's to the motherboard directly and enabling SSD Write Cache using the Samsung Tools?
2) Do you think I would be able to enable SSD write cache on a different computer, update all the SSD firmwares and then connect each of the 8drives to the LSI 9361 and have it perform markedly better?

Thanks mate
 

hakanaiseishin

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Dec 18, 2015
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Apologies for bumping an old post but I just purchased a 9361-8i to run 2, 512GB 850 Pros in RAID 0 with nightly backups for a dual xeon workstation and I'm having the same issues as the OP. Has there been any updates to this issue? I have gone over the few important threads on this site and others and I have yet to find any solution. I've already used magician DC to verify the write cache is on but it still doesn't seem to be working as I'm getting 150MBps write and 1200MBps read no matter what settings I use. I was using a SATA2 (!) areca controller prior to this that I got for extremely cheap and it was at least getting 500 read 500 write.

Is there some alternative to MegaSCU to modify the setting that's preventing the disk write cache from being used? I can tell with certainty that turning it off on the drives directly through magician DC has absolutely no impact on write performance.

Is there an alternative card for <$500 that will work with these drives correctly?

Edit: Nevermind, I'm just going to switch to an Intel 750 series.
 
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