SSD Raid 10 for ESXi Hardware Recommendations?

[scline]

Hello!

Currently I have an ESXi machine that I do all my testing/tinkering on and am noticing I can only get about 250mb/s of write speeds.

This is using an LSI 9260 series card connected to 4x 480GB Sandisk SSD's. Alone they reach ~500mb/s and I was able to validate this, but in raid 10 the performance just isn't what I am expecting.

On the card there is no BBU and I have cacheing disabled, its been a while but I did disable any precautions around lowering performance due to the lack of BBU (this server is on a UPS and if data is lost there - no big deal).

I am wondering what you would recommend for a raid card, LSI 9300 (or newer) series, planning on just raid 10 with up to 8 SSD disks. Rather not have to deal with BBU since this is on a UPS and vm's are backed up weekly towards another box.

ESX Specs
CPU: 18 CPUs x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2686 v3 @ 2.00GHz
RAM: 128GB

 

[Rand__]

Which SanDisk drives are those? Maybe you just need better drives?

 

[scline]

Correction they are 4x960G drives - SDSSDHII-960G, outside the controller they did work at expected speeds (500-ish writes), currently using about 30% of its space.

 

[Rand__]

Well those are not too suited for heavy workload... consistent writes will choke them.
You might be better off with some Enterprise write oriented drives, classic example is Intel S3700/3710

 

[vanfawx]

Have you tried enabling fastpath on your controller? There should be a software trial key floating about on google for the 9260.

 

[scline]

Turns out I have an IBM5014 card that does not allow enabling fastpast via software.

Was looking at LSI 9271 cards when I stumbled on 9272 (they are 1/3 of the price). I am not able to find much information on the 9272 cards anywhere. I don't need BBU/Cache since I only plan on SSD storage and generally bypass any card cache.

I am considering moving to proxmox just for zfs support at this point (^_^)