G'day everyone, all the best for the New Year. I've run into an issue that has me puzzled with my rather antiquated Supermicro X7DWA-N-based workstation using an IBM M1015 or an LSI 9240-8i with Samsung 850 Pro SSD's. I apologise if this issue has been brought up before, but I couldn't find anything about it using the search function.
I originally built this machine back in 2008 with a couple of 3.4 GHz quad core Xeons and 32 GB of RAM. At the time, I simply transferred my LSI dual-channel U320 SCSI card and hard disk RAID-0 array from my previous PC and have been running that for a while up until now.
One of the disks in the array has just cashed its chips in, so I figured it was time to boost the performance a little and look at SSD substitutes. I picked up an IBM M1015 dirt-cheap from a friend and I ended up buying four 128GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD's as the 10 year limited warranty printed on the boxes sounded good (although I don't know how that'll work out in practice), and the price here worked out to less than a buck per Gig. I'll only be using the operating system and programs on this RAID array as I keep my Ghost image, data and documents on two separate SATA mechanical drives, so I didn't think there was much point in opting for the larger capacity SSD's.
I thought I would run some tests initially just to suss out any potential problems, so I started with a single SSD to get a baseline idea of how they would perform. I connected this SSD to the motherboard SATA port running in AHCI mode. I wasn't expecting much from the SATA II ports thinking this drive would saturate the port and came up with the following result:
I then hooked up all four SSD's in RAID-0 on the SATA ports and came up with following result:
The next test was a single SSD as a JBOD drive on the IBM M1015 card (it has the latest firmware and O.S. has latest driver), as you can see the Seq Q32T1 and Seq readings increased over the single SSD on the SATA port.
The next test was four SSD's in RAID-0 on the IBM card, the Seq Q32T1 increasing over the RAID-0 setup on the SATA ports, but dropping below the 4K Q32 Random Read and Write test of the SATA II ports, the IOPS being significantly lower than that of the SATA II test.
I didn't have another card to try and all I could borrow was a new LSI 9240-8i from a friend and ran the tests again. There was no improvement at all, the 9240-8i just mirrored my previous M1015 tests. After double checking everything, it seemed I had no other option but to go out and buy and try a different card, which would take time, so I decided to re-flash my IBM M1015 to a 9211-8i with the latest ir firmware in the interim to see if that would make any difference.
The 9211-8i ir firmware certainly improved the results as you can see in the following test. I'm not sure what's going on here, I really don't know what I should expect to obtain.
I was looking at buying an LSI 9266-8i, for example. Or does anyone have a better recommendation for a card? My board has 2nd generation PCI-e x16 slots, so going to a more recent Gen. 3 PCI-e card may only offer future upgradeability with no real advantage on this machine.
Yeah, I know this is an old rig (like its owner-I'm in my sixties), but it's been rock-stable for years, often doing data logging for days. I'm pretty reluctant to build a new Supermicro Xeon-based PC at present as I would have to import most of the parts (read expensive) and I use this machine with a GPIB bus for my test instruments. A new PCI-e GPIB card for a newer generation motherboard is just over a grand - I'm not too keen on laying out that amount for a card. I still use an old EPROM programmer on the parallel port and have other devices that use the serial COM ports, it's unfortunate that these are now considered to be obsolete and are no longer included on the newer stuff. Any insight would be much appreciated.
Tom
I originally built this machine back in 2008 with a couple of 3.4 GHz quad core Xeons and 32 GB of RAM. At the time, I simply transferred my LSI dual-channel U320 SCSI card and hard disk RAID-0 array from my previous PC and have been running that for a while up until now.
One of the disks in the array has just cashed its chips in, so I figured it was time to boost the performance a little and look at SSD substitutes. I picked up an IBM M1015 dirt-cheap from a friend and I ended up buying four 128GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD's as the 10 year limited warranty printed on the boxes sounded good (although I don't know how that'll work out in practice), and the price here worked out to less than a buck per Gig. I'll only be using the operating system and programs on this RAID array as I keep my Ghost image, data and documents on two separate SATA mechanical drives, so I didn't think there was much point in opting for the larger capacity SSD's.
I thought I would run some tests initially just to suss out any potential problems, so I started with a single SSD to get a baseline idea of how they would perform. I connected this SSD to the motherboard SATA port running in AHCI mode. I wasn't expecting much from the SATA II ports thinking this drive would saturate the port and came up with the following result:
I then hooked up all four SSD's in RAID-0 on the SATA ports and came up with following result:
The next test was a single SSD as a JBOD drive on the IBM M1015 card (it has the latest firmware and O.S. has latest driver), as you can see the Seq Q32T1 and Seq readings increased over the single SSD on the SATA port.
The next test was four SSD's in RAID-0 on the IBM card, the Seq Q32T1 increasing over the RAID-0 setup on the SATA ports, but dropping below the 4K Q32 Random Read and Write test of the SATA II ports, the IOPS being significantly lower than that of the SATA II test.
I didn't have another card to try and all I could borrow was a new LSI 9240-8i from a friend and ran the tests again. There was no improvement at all, the 9240-8i just mirrored my previous M1015 tests. After double checking everything, it seemed I had no other option but to go out and buy and try a different card, which would take time, so I decided to re-flash my IBM M1015 to a 9211-8i with the latest ir firmware in the interim to see if that would make any difference.
The 9211-8i ir firmware certainly improved the results as you can see in the following test. I'm not sure what's going on here, I really don't know what I should expect to obtain.
I was looking at buying an LSI 9266-8i, for example. Or does anyone have a better recommendation for a card? My board has 2nd generation PCI-e x16 slots, so going to a more recent Gen. 3 PCI-e card may only offer future upgradeability with no real advantage on this machine.
Yeah, I know this is an old rig (like its owner-I'm in my sixties), but it's been rock-stable for years, often doing data logging for days. I'm pretty reluctant to build a new Supermicro Xeon-based PC at present as I would have to import most of the parts (read expensive) and I use this machine with a GPIB bus for my test instruments. A new PCI-e GPIB card for a newer generation motherboard is just over a grand - I'm not too keen on laying out that amount for a card. I still use an old EPROM programmer on the parallel port and have other devices that use the serial COM ports, it's unfortunate that these are now considered to be obsolete and are no longer included on the newer stuff. Any insight would be much appreciated.
Tom