Slow Performance on HP DL380 G4 SmartArray 6i Controller
- From: m.whitby@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:38:42 -0700
Hi all, I'm very new to SCSI and server hardware in general, so please
bear with any slight misinformation I might have. Heres the situation,
my company has the server and RAID SCSI card mentioned in the subject
line, recently I have experianced less than adequate performance from
the server and I beleive it is down to the storage subsystem, so being
as we only have the one SCSI RAID HBA in the system then I beleive the
SmartArray 6i is in question, or the drives or cables attached to it.
The problem is due to copy time between drives, I attempted to copy a
14GB file from the RAID 5 array to the RAID 1+0 array (see below for
setup) and the time was very excessive, the estimated time remaining
would flick between 8 minutes and 45 minutes, it would seem the RAID
1+0 array was always being used but the RAID 5 intermittently was not
being used (looking at drive activity lights). I habe since used a
program called TeraCopy to measure the transfer speed, and it appears
to be between 5 and 10MB/s, which seems pretty bad considering my home
RAID 0 with 2 7200RPM maxtors goes @ 40MB/s when copying to itself. I
have tried copying from the RAID 5 to itself, but got much the same
results (around 10MB/s, falling occasionally to 4.2).
Another issue is that occasionaly windows explorer will just freeze
while traversing directories, I am not sure if this storage related or
not, but the pause is quite lengthy (5-8 seconds?).
Is it just me, or is this pretty slow for a U320 SCSI setup with 10K
HDD's attached in the RAID setup I have below? I have done some
looking and found two possible causes, and I might be on the wrong
track:
potential problem 1 - we are running all 6 HDD's in simplex mode, as
far as I know, this means all HDD's are sharing a single U320 channel,
and therefore the same bus so are sharing the bandwidth.
potential problem 2 - we have only 64MB cache on the controller, also
it is not battery backed, while I beleive that battery backed is only
so that the controller can store writes for when the HDDs are back up,
I've heard suggestions that battery backed also gives extra speed. Not
sure if this is true or not?
If anyone could offer any information that would help I'd much
appreciate it, as I'm very surprised that SCSI drives that cost
hundreds of pounds are much slower than my slower SATA HDD's using an
onboard low spec RAID controller!
Our setup is as such:
Windows Server 2003 R2
2GB RAM
1 SmartArray 6i U320 HBA with 64MB Cache (not battery backed)
connected to one HP Ultrium StoreageWorks 448 tape drive via the
external VHDCI connector and 6 internal HP Badged 10k Hard Drives, 2
drives are 72GB and 4 are 146GB. All the Hard drives are on a single
channel (HP server is in what it calls Simplex mode, as opposed to
Duplex), the tape drive is on a seperate channel. The drives are setup
as a RAID 1+0 array containing the two 72GB's and a RAID 5 array
containing the 146GB's. All SCSI ID's, RAID stripe sizes etc are on
defaults, for the RAID 5 I think this is 64KB, for the 1+0 it is
128KB. The HP Array Accelerator is on. The RAID 5 Array is 420029 MB,
the 1+0 does not use all available space and as such is only 34726 MB.
All drives have been checked with the HP diagnostics and are fine
apparently, the only issue is that one drive has had 2 timeouts (I
remember that one of these timeouts stopped the server booting, but on
next reboot was fine).
.
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