LSI 9270 shredding my hard drives?

[Darkytoo]

The errors were in the LSI card, "PD Sense 0:0...." errors. it was a 3 drive RAID, and then I was testing with just two. I did do single drive RAID 0 which confirmed the slowdown on the stripeset. LSI also told me about the heat and I too have a fan sitting on top of the card, right now it's at 54C.

 

[lunadesign]

So only the 840 Pro was generating the PD Sense errors?

Just out of curiosity, for each drive, what performance were you seeing onboard vs connected to the LSI in a single drive RAID 0?

 

[Chuckleb]

Is this directly to the card or a backplane involved? I have PD issues that I am attributing to the backplane.

 

[lunadesign]

UPDATE:

It looks like I've got a fix for problem #2. WD's Level 3 support guy was really helpful and provided me with the latest firmware (01.01A02) for the Se drives. Now, when I hit a single WD drive with two long read ops, the drive deals with it very well. If I start both read ops at the same time, the drive struggles like before for about a second or two (with a little of the growling noise) and then quickly (within about 4-5 seconds) ramps up to 170 MB/s. If I start the second read op after the first one, it skips the struggling stage and settles in at around 170 MB/s. I'm still testing to make sure that this firmware didn't make a huge sacrifice in other areas to improve multi sequential read performance but so far it looks really good.

I'm still working with LSI on problem #1 (controller doesn't read from both drives when it should).

UPDATE #2:

The new WD Se firmware seems solid. I ran some benchmarks on a single drive before and after the firmware update and the results were nearly identical except the updated drive is a bit slower (~10%) on small random writes. The benchmark tests didn't trigger the big problem I was seeing with two readers but my own testing so far (connected to motherboard) shows that this problem has been completely solved. I've updated two of my drives and am trying them on the LSI in a RAID1 configuration today.

 

[lunadesign]

UPDATE #3:

The RAID 1 with two WD Se drives (both with upgraded firmware) worked well. The LSI card still seems to be acting oddly and not using both drives as much as it should be for simultaneous reads. When the LSI card is only using one drive and there are multiple reads going on, the WD Se (with upgraded firmware) works well. For most of the time, the single drive runs at or near the speed it would be if a single reader was reading a single drive. Every few minutes, I saw the single drive fall for about 2 seconds to the 10-15 MB/s level with the growling noise but otherwise worked great.

I'm still working with LSI on the controller issue.