LSI RAID Controller help, 2308 chip on-board ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard is slow!

Request some help for those who know about the LSI controllers. Using the 2308 controller chip found on the ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard and I have eight 128 GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD's (Firmware 1.5) set up in RAID 0.

This is the very poor speed I am getting:




This is the speed I got with a mere two 128 GB Vertex 4's on Z77 Intel Raid 0:





Both are 64kb stripe.

Pretty much the only speed that looks correct on the LSI setup is the 4k read and Acc.time's. Everything else look's very slow. The 4k write is abysmal, and the sequential speed is far far below what eight M4's got here using the same controller chip (4180 MB/s seq read):

http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/sata-3/lsi-sas-9207-8i-pcie-3-0-host-bus-adapter-quick-preview/5/


These are the settings:













Now in that last screenshot above, it shows disk cache enabled (which doesn't effect the speed with before and after change runs), read policy to none, write policy: write through.

But when I go to change any of those items by right clicking the virtual drive properties, you can see the window, the only option is disk cache policy.

According to this site: http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16553.aspx

There are a lot more options there that I don't have. What gives?

Anyone have a clue why this performance is so poor?

Am I suppose to buy some of this software for hundreds and hundreds of dollars located here: http://store.lsi.com/store.cfm/Advanced_Software_Options/

Just to get my LSI controller speed working properly?

Below are screen shots of how ASRock implemented this chip and how I configured it in RAID.






The BIOS of the ASRock motherboard is P1.10.

I take it the configuration utility in my screen shots is HBA and not WebBIOS?

I noticed under the MegaRAID utility it doesn't allow me to change the write policy and keeps it write-through. Is there a way to force that to write back? (I have a UPS for the computer, but the motherboard LSI chip does not have a battery backup). I only have one option (Disk Cache Policy) and not all of the options as found here:

http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16553.aspx

Under MegaRAID my settings are: Access Policy- Read/Write, Disk Cache Policy- Enabled (only settings I can change), Read Policy- No read ahead, IO Policy- Direct IO, Write Policy- Write Through.

Also, in the BIOS configuration utility there is absolutely nowhere to change the stripe size during volume create. Is this on purpose? It only uses the default 64kb. Some say that my low performance may be because I am not using 128kb stripe, but I highly doubt that as 64kb has done really well in mixed-use scenarios in recent RAID tests versus other stripe sizes.

Ok, so I re-flashed the firmware of all V4's to 1.5 and secure erased. I set two of them up on Intel X79 RAID 0 with 64k stripe and tested 2x, 4x, and 6x V4's on the LSI 2308 RAID 0 64k stripe (only one possible apparently).

For a refresher, this is 2x V4's on Z77 with write-back on:




This is 2x V4 on Intel X79 RAID 0 with write-back on:



As you can see, Z77 always come in quite a bit faster than X79 in RAID 0 for some reason. I've seen the same thing over many different motherboards. Anyone know why?


This is 2x V4's on X79 with write-back off:



For these results, it seems like the only major difference between having write-back on and off is the 4k write speed.


Now all LSI tests below have write-back off seeing as you cannot enable it. 2x V4's on LSI 2308:



Pretty much a drop across the board versus X79 besides 4k read/write.


4x V4 on LSI:



Here seq write doubles, but seq read only increases about 80% for some reason. 4k write actually decreases and I don't know how, but 4k-64Third stays the same.


6x LSI:



Here 6x drives is around 280% the speed of 2x drives in seq write, but drops down to only around 220% of 2x drives in seq read (300% being perfect of course). No change in 4k-64third versus 2x and 4x really. The only difference with 6x is somewhat lackluster seq speed increase.


And the original 8x LSI test that got me questioning all this:



Seq write is doing pretty good, 367% out of a perfect 400% versus two drives. Seq read is much worse, only 290% versus two drives. Not sure why it's so low when running 8x PCI-E 3.0.

Once again 4k-64Third is pretty much the same as 2x drives. Measureably lower than X79 and Z77 with only two drives. I knew with RAID 0 the 4k read/write speeds would not increase, but I surely thought 4k-64Third would.

So basically, there is no need for this LSI controller to be on PCI-E 3.0 8x as it doesn't come close to saturating PCI-E 2.0 8x. Not sure how ASRock claim 3.8 GB/s using this controller.

All I can think of is maybe crappy firmware on the 2308 chip, some sort of bad drivers or this LSI chip is just not that good/too stripped down (no memory cache) and being integrated to really shine.

Here is a user with the exact 8x Vertex 128GB drives but using a LSI 9265-8i RAID card:



Seq are about identical, but his 4k write and 4k-64Third speed destroys mine.

Any thoughts, anything I can test while I have the OS on 2x V4's X79 and 6x V4's on LSI? If this is as fast as it's going to get, for $1000 in drives and $250+ for the LSI controller I may think about reverting to something else. And apparently Fastpath won't work on this chip, so that rules out any help there.

Hopefully the LSI tech can shed some light on the topic.

Which cache? The Windows 7 write back check mark in device manager?

EDIT: Turned it off and no change in speed.
Edited by CallsignVega - 8/3/12 at 10:23am

Ya, wait a second. How are they getting 3500+ MB/sec seq read's with eight ADATA SX900 SSD's? As far as I can tell those are far inferior to Vertex 4's and I am only getting 2100 MB/seq.

Something can't be right!

I flashed the firmware and BIOS to the latest found for the LSI 9217_8i. Now it calls it a LSI 9217_8i instead of "Eval board". Unfortunately there is no speed increase.

Trying to figure out here how that guy in the Hexus Extreme 11 video got 3500+ MB/seq read..