LSI 9271-8i compatibility with HGST HUH728080ALE604 drives

[Ben Conner]

Hi,

I recently upgraded an older LSI raid HBA to the 9271-8i and hung 4 of the HE8 drives off of it in a RAID 6 configuration. I noticed sluggishness on the array in a vSphere 6.0 environment and the latency at times is well over 10 times the average spec for these drives. The VMs on this server are typically low to moderate usage.

That caused me to look closer at the compatibility list and found this specific drive isn't on the 9271-8i list, nor is that controller on the ones tested by HGST. So I'm wondering if this is the issue, and is there another LSI raid card that would be more compatible if it is?

Much appreciated!

--Ben

 

[pricklypunter]

Hardware wise, there should be no problems there, but you might find drivers/ firmware are not playing well together, if they are out of date. I would update all drivers/ firmware first and test again before going much further

 

[Ben Conner]

I bought it a little over a month ago new; the firmware on it is at 23.12.0-0011. Will verify that is the most current release. VMWare maintains the drivers that talk to the device and all the drivers are up to date on it.

Could there be any issue with these drives running in 512 byte block emulation mode? (The E6 designates 512e emulation)?

I'm thinking one inexpensive patch to it would be to buy the cache vault kit...

--Ben

 

[pricklypunter]

I would be wanting to identify the actual root cause, before throwing more money at it, but in a pinch, I might stick another card in, maybe just an M1015 or something, just to see if the problem moves along with it. I still think it's more likely a driver or card firmware issue though, those disks are rock solid normally. I will be interested to hear how it turns out

 

[Ben Conner]

Dang. That's easier said than done. I have a narrow window once a week for production servers to do stuff like that. Will have to wait until next Friday night. Sorry. And what I put in would need to be able to import the RAID 6 configuration.

--Ben

 

[m4ntic0r]

I had some similar issues too, but not with that drives. My setup was ESXi 6.5u1 and a LSI 9271-8i with CacheCade and CacheVault.
I had 2x500GB Samsung 850Evo in Raid1 and 4x 4TB HGST Megascale in Raid 10. Sometimes for both arrays i got latency warnings in ESXi and the system was not responsive for some seconds. I did not find out what was causing this issue. I tried write through/write back mode and different other settings for both arrays. Perhaps there is an issue with the esxi integrated LSI drivers for this raid card..

Before i had both arrays running with same configuration with server 2016 for 2-3month and had no problems. Speed and stability was great.