LSI 9260-16i slow and keeps failing drives (Windows)

[Leprechaun]

Hi,

I'm running a LSI 9260-16i with 12x 6TB HGST SATA drives in RAID6 on Windows 10. 5 of the drives are in an Icydock drive cage.

I have two separate problems:

1.) The write for the RAID6 array is very slow it's between 20-60MB/sec, the read seems acceptable 150MB/sec
Should it be this slow? I was hoping for write speeds at least 100MB/sec. Is there anything I can do to improve my speeds?

2.) Drives keep failing in my RAID6 array. Every week or two, while writing to the array a drive will fail. It doesn't seem to happen while reading. I've had these drives for a long time in my TrueNAS box never gave a problem, they're fine. They're HGST drives, very solid. The SMART is fine too. I'm open to the possibility that I'm reading the SMART wrong.
I just mark the drive as "good" and re-add it to the array. It seems semi-random which drive fails. I'm not sure why these fails are happening. My best guess is power fluctuations, the drive might not have enough power for a split second and it fails. This might be from the Icydock cage but at least one time it wasn't a drive in the cage.
Separately, when I add the drive back I sometimes get some corrupted data. My only guess is that I'm adding the drive back incorrectly and the bad data on the re-added drive is being used instead of being overwritten when the drive is added back.
I know it's possible that the drives are failing and giving bad data but it just doesn't seem right. Given the history of the drives, the random failing, and only during writes. My gut is telling it's not the drives but power or maybe the card. It's possible the card and/or drives could be overheating.

I'm happy to provide more details to help diagnose the problems.

Thank you very much.

 

[jdnz]

do you have the BBU installed? Those cards have cache - but will only automatically enable write cache if the BBU is present ( you can force it on - but of course without the BBU that's risky )

I ran into similar poor write perf on a 9440-8i - and it was due to having no write cache (it's a dram-less card ) - testing on an 8 drive raid5 array I'd got 50mb/s or less.

I replaced it with a 9260-8i I had lying around which had a BBU and get ~600mb/s writes on that array now with write cache on - but tested it with it with write cache forced off and again write speed dropped massively.

 

[Leprechaun]

Nope, I didn't feel like investing in one. I will buy one and try it out. Thanks for the tip!


EDIT:
I just noticed, my card doesn't have the battery connector for the BBU cable. Unless I'm missing something, which I could be.
I'll just force it, data isn't that important.

 

[jdnz]

you can see how the BBU connectsto the 9260-16i here https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/QFUAAOSweEFcrtiy/s-l1200.webp - they're remote on the 16i as the bigger heatsink compared to the 8i means no space to directly mount it

 

[Chriggel]

I'd say that the read speed is also slower than it should be. I wouldn't bother with the BBU, just force write back like you said. Also, check the usual stuff, like firmware and driver versions.

A popular cause of drives randomly dropping is long cables. The controller could also be overheating like you said, which would create random janky behaviour. This would also explain bad performance. Check the temperature.

What's the stripe size of your array? Is it appropriate for your workload? Is the array properly initialized?