PERC 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks - Page 105 - Overclock.net

Bonz™ · 01-28-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Villainstone

Update: Using HD Tach on default I get about 30MB/s read, and upping the HD Tune blocks to 8MB I am seeing about 500MB/s. Is there a way to test actually real world tranfers?

Do you have a few HDD's in your machine to transfer to?

I would say a few networked machines, but unless you've got quad gig or more you won't be able to see.

The best way would be the array -> other internal drives.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Villainstone

That is how I updated my FW. I let windows find the drivers after I used black tape on the 5/6 pin. I then realized I had the wrong cable, now I have the right one, and now I am troubleshooting the array. So does anyone suppose that all is well here? I mean I am getting much better results witha higher block size but can anyone explain why so slow with smaller blocks.

With my 5 drive array I had to go to 512MB block size in order to actually show full performance. At 64k I was getting 80-100MB/s average, and it kept jumping all the way to 512k block size. 512k I actually got 360MB/s average. Any higher than 512k yielded the same results.

lowfat · 01-28-09

Just upgraded my array.

6x640GB RAID5 + 1 hot spare

Write speeds are abysmal but whatever, its just a file server.

daellum67 · 01-28-09

a friend of mine just bought 4 500gb 7200.12 drives to use in RAID 0 his new rig- i reccomended that he pick up one of these raid cards off of ebay, as he was planning to put them on the SB750, but on further examination, he'd have to run it in a PCIe gen 2 slot that is x16 physical, 4x electrical. as i understand, the card will fit into the slot but is meant to run at x8.

my question is what impact the x4 slot will have on the performance of the array - i told him to hold off on the card until i could get this figured out for him.

DuckieHo · 01-28-09

For those having benchmarks issue.... If you get HD Tune Pro, it allows you to adjust the sector test size.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lowfat

Just upgraded my array.

6x640GB RAID5 + 1 hot spare

Write speeds are abysmal but whatever, its just a file server.

Write speeds should be much better... Are you sure Write Back is Enabled? With my 3xRaptors, I went from 12MB/s to 121MB/s!

PERC RAID5 (Write-Back OFF, Adaptive-Read-Ahead) [64KB]

PERC RAID5 (Write-Back ON,Adaptive-Read-Ahead) [64KB]

Quote:

Originally Posted by daellum67

a friend of mine just bought 4 500gb 7200.12 drives to use in RAID 0 his new rig- i reccomended that he pick up one of these raid cards off of ebay, as he was planning to put them on the SB750, but on further examination, he'd have to run it in a PCIe gen 2 slot that is x16 physical, 4x electrical. as i understand, the card will fit into the slot but is meant to run at x8.

my question is what impact the x4 slot will have on the performance of the array - i told him to hold off on the card until i could get this figured out for him.

The card will work x4 PCIe 1.x mode then.... that will provide 1000MB/s bandwidth which is plenty.

Bonz™ · 01-28-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by daellum67

a friend of mine just bought 4 500gb 7200.12 drives to use in RAID 0 his new rig- i reccomended that he pick up one of these raid cards off of ebay, as he was planning to put them on the SB750, but on further examination, he'd have to run it in a PCIe gen 2 slot that is x16 physical, 4x electrical. as i understand, the card will fit into the slot but is meant to run at x8.

my question is what impact the x4 slot will have on the performance of the array - i told him to hold off on the card until i could get this figured out for him.

I'm running mine in a x4 2.0 slot.

a 1.x PCI-e 4x slot will yield 1GB/s bandwidth
a 2.0 PCI-e 4x slot will yield 2GB/s bandwidth

He'll be fine.

Edit: Oops, didn't read Duckie's fine print at the bottom already answering your question

daellum67 · 01-28-09

ok cool

and this is all that is needed for the ddr2 slot?
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...40&dcaid=17902

Villainstone · 01-28-09

Ok sense performance is looking better I am over at the OCZ forums right now. There are several guys that are very experienced with these SSD drives and RAID cards. There is even a guy with the PERC 5/i card and 3 Core V2 SSD's. I will post any and all help that they provide so that anyone else here can benefit from their help as well as yours.

lowfat · 01-28-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by DuckieHo

For those having benchmarks issue.... If you get HD Tune Pro, it allows you to adjust the sector test size.

Write speeds should be much better... Are you sure Write Back is Enabled? With my 3xRaptors, I went from 12MB/s to 121MB/s!
Ya I fixed it. Cache was set to Direct IO instead of Cached IO

Besides the access times I am getting as high reads/writes as my SSD array.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Villainstone

Ok sense performance is looking better I am over at the OCZ forums right now. There are several guys that are very experienced with these SSD drives and RAID cards. There is even a guy with the PERC 5/i card and 3 Core V2 SSD's. I will post any and all help that they provide so that anyone else here can benefit from their help as well as yours.

I've used my SSD's on my Perc 5/i. I was running 4 x Patriot 32GB drives. On the PERC they didn't have the write performance that they do on the ARC1220.

This is 4 drives w/ 128k stripe

and 4 drives w/ 256k stripe

and compared to the ARC1220 w/ 128k stripe

Is your card flashed to the LSI firmware? If not flash it. Then download and install the MegaRAID manager software.

Then make sure these are all set.

Hope that helps.