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HP P440ar controller and SSD performance

 
ryan_1212
Advisor

HP P440ar controller and SSD performance

I have two identical configuration Proliant Gen9 servers with the P440ar and the SAS expander. It is a 26SFF bay chassis. I have 4 HP SSDs (part number 727972-b21) which are Intel DC3500 SATA SSDs with HP firmware. 20 bays have 1.2TB 10K SAS drives. 19 are in R6 and one is a spare.

 

I have found three issues with the controllers\firmware so far. All performance related information posted was generated with IOmeter running on the Vmware IO Analyzer tool. Two had fixes and workarounds, one does not.

 

1) HP Smart Pathing for SSD. Turn it off immediately. Seqential Write performance dropped to under 75MB/s in RAID0 with these SSDs. RAID 5 - under 50MB/s. RAID 1 about 60MB/s. Terrible! 

./hpssacli ctrl slot=x array x modify ssdsmartpath=disable

 

2) SAS expander. The drives would disapear from the array after a reboot (Seriously!).  HP replaced both controllers to no avail, finally I found a note on the HP site about the SAS expander firmware which after upgraded to 1.80 corrected that issue.

 

3) This is the BIGGEST issue of all. After configuring the SSDs in RAID1+0:

Read performance is OK

600MB/s seqential as measured by the max_throughput baseline.

87,000 IOPs as measured by the max_iops basline.

 

Write performance sucks

100-150MB/s seqential as measured by the max_write_throughput baseline.

1227 IOPs as measured by the max_write_iops baseline.

 

I have a case open with L3 about this and they have indicated that they are working with the storage controller vendor on a firmware update.  Has anyone else seen anything like this before on the P440ar controllers and found a workaround?