poor nvme performance on broadcom 9440-8i / lenovo 530-8i?

[andrewbedia]

I got a pair of these cards and one of the overpriced LSI cables to make it work with NVMe. I've got it flashed to latest firmware and have a P3500 2TB drive hooked to it.

Before using it on this tri-mode HBA, I used it on a PCIe card converter and I was getting 3GB/s reads. This broadcom card only gets 700MB/s.

Anyone having similar experiences with poor NVMe performance on these cards?

 

[andrewbedia]

Bump. Anyone have these newer cards?

@Patrick have you done any testing with this generation of cards and/or are you planning to?

 

[croakz]

I haven't tried out my 530-8i yet, but I can test it against a Samsung PM963 later tonight.

 

[Rand__]

one of the overpriced LSI cables to make it work with NVMe.

Which are these?

 

[andrewbedia]

Which are these?

05-50065-00

 

[nthu9280]

@Rand__ Regular sff-8643 to sff-8639 (U.2) cable can be had from directly from Intel for under $10. But they don't have the 8643 - 2x U.2.

@FMA1394 Curious which firmware you are using. LSI or Lenovo? LSI has two options for IT / 9400.

 

[Rand__]

I was under the impression that a regular cable wouldn't work, thats why i asked

 

[andrewbedia]

Intel cable does not work. IDK if other cables will work, but I know from first hand experience that the cheap Intel cables do not function with this card

using HBA_9400-8i_Mixed_Profile.bin from HBA 9400-8i Tri-Mode Storage Adapter version 09.00.03.00

 

[andrewbedia]

@croakz did you give it a try yet?

 

[croakz]

I only have that cheap Intel cable and of course it doesn't work. Got a new mobo with U.2 built in so I might just dump these Lenovo 9400s.

 

[james23]

hey, im really curious about the performance on this card (9440-8i). i was hoping to run a single rd1 on 2x higher end nvme drives, id be fine with 1x drive worth of R/W rd1 performance (or even a tad less).

i hope others can chime in on the lsi 94xx line and nvme performance.

FMA: just to be clear, you flashed your 530-8i to 9440-8i RAID firmware , right? (ie not the IT firmware that many others have flashed to)
and you are only testing it with 1x u.2 nvme attached, right?

only thing i can add to this, is this thread (in chinese), they have some benchmarks, and are talking about the 94xx cards, but im not sure if the benchmarks are for the 94xx cards or for the other NVMe cards they are talking about (ie the asus 4x m.2 ect..)

关于Broadcom(LSI) 9400 Series NVMe线材的可选方案(更新可用线材) - 第4页 - 电脑讨论 - Chiphell - 分享与交流用户体验

(btw, some of the google translations are really funny)

EDIT: i re-read some of it, they def. have some 94xx + nvme, benchmarks (using RD0) on page 3, and they look pretty nice/fast. so that is promising

edit2: (the red marks are mine) it looks like its important to NOT use the cards read ahead / WB when using nvme, this guys write speeds are about 1/5th (also correct me if im wrong here- but that must mean he is NOT using a 9440-8i, as that card has no ram/cache?):

 

[andrewbedia]

I did flash to stock 9440/9400-8i IT mode. I'm sure it's possible to flash to IR mode by just changing out the firmware file when flashing with storcli and moving the jumpers around on the card (don't have exact steps handy). Is read ahead/WB a thing in non-raid mode?

EDIT: Be mindful that those pictures are from a 9460-8i. Those cards are likely only IR mode, given a long history of broadcom/avago/lsi of 9x6x cards