LSI 9240 8i: RAID 10 slow perfromance

[voodooFX]

New day, new performance problem

LSI 9240-8i (latest fw) with 6x 2.0TB (Seagate Constellation ES) in RAID10 (3x RAID1 with 2 disks all in RAID0). Strip is 64KB (the max allowed)

Seq. perfromance: 200MB/s (read/write), often lower..

Don't know what to tweak because almost all the vg parameters are single so you don't have much to choice...

To check the controller I created a RAID0 vg with all the drives and the speed is ok, about 700MB/s
So what's wrong with RAID10?
I was also surprised to see that the controller is not smart enough to read from the 6 drives, it only does it from 3..

 

[Rhinox]

9240 controller does not have any on-board cache. If you use raid1 (or raid10), I think controller must compare data written to both mirrors. This might be quite difficult without cache.

In case of raid0 there is nothing to compare. It's mirroring that's causing problems. Would not be surprised if you got quite low raid1 performance (compared to single disk)...

 

[voodooFX]

If this is true I can not really understand what this controller is made for

 

[neo]

If this is true I can not really understand what this controller is made for

RAID 0 seems like a self bet, or flashing it to 8e and using a file system RAID 10 function (ZFS, BTRFS, etc..)

 

[mrkrad]

ZFS or JBOD/HBA duties!

 

[canta]

RAID 0 seems like a self bet, or flashing it to 8e and using a file system RAID 10 function (ZFS, BTRFS, etc..)

If you are on Linux. No need to flash it 9211. All drive treats as jbod. No need to mess around.

 

[voodooFX]

OK at the end I found the optimal solution: all drives in JBOD -> datastore -> FreeNAS (VM)

I also did a little test: single RAID0 drive VS jBOD drive

Write (seq. 4GB)
R0: 115MB/s
JB: 133MB/s

Read (seq. 4GB)
R0: 118MB/s
JB: 137MB/s

latency (ioping): no difference

Thank you all for the suggestions

 

[canta]

OK at the end I found the optimal solution: all drives in JBOD -> datastore -> FreeNAS (VM)

I also did a little test: single RAID0 drive VS jBOD drive

Write (seq. 4GB)
R0: 115MB/s
JB: 133MB/s

Read (seq. 4GB)
R0: 118MB/s
JB: 137MB/s

latency (ioping): no difference

Thank you all for the suggestions

do you test RAID1 on 9260 or 9265 ? I am just curious.

Thanks!

 

[alex1002]

I am experiencing the same issue with my controller. I hope you can solve it

 

[voodooFX]

Hi, I ended using all my drives on the 9240 as JBOD.
Now the 9240 has connected just two intel 730 480G and the 9260 8x Constellation ES 2.0TB in RAID50 (which gives me about 1GB/s in R/W ) and I hope this is really my new stable configuration because I'm mixing and testing stuff for weeks...

canta: the test was on the 9240

 

[canta]

Hi, I ended using all my drives on the 9240 as JBOD.
Now the 9240 has connected just two intel 730 480G and the 9260 8x Constellation ES 2.0TB in RAID50 (which gives me about 1GB/s in R/W ) and I hope this is really my new stable configuration because I'm mixing and testing stuff for weeks...

canta: the test was on the 9240

thanks...
I just stick with 9240 for raid 1 on proxmox, very satisfied with speed. two raid 1, ssd 240g (proxmox reside with some small vms), and one black wd 750g (for big vm and zoneminder(4x720P cam + 2x480 cam) vm)..
the good thing is; I can pass command via smartctl to set apm=254 on those black wd.