Poor performance on 2120S SCSI RAID Controller with HP Proliant ML 150 G2

[javen_1]

I have a dual Xeon ML 150 G2 just purchased with an Adaptec 2120S SCSI RAID controller and 5 15K RPM Ultra320 hot swap disks, the controller is in a 64 bit 66 MHz PCI slot, I have created a RAID-0 array and should expect to see speeds near 300MB/s, I am only seeing 50-60 MB/s which is far below expectations, the OS is W3K, all drivers and firware are the latest and greatest, all caching is enabled on drives and controllers, Can anyone assist?

[e4services]

Your expectation of 300MB/s is coming from what? Ultra320? 320MB/s is the "maximum" transfer rate (actual rates may vary).

Your resultant transfer rates is most likely due to RAID. If you were using a simple SCSI controller, your expectation is justified. But the overhead from the RAID processing can be as high as 18 times, as shown from other members tests (see threadId=982553). This seems to be the result of the cards not having write cache memory and processing power.

[javen_1]

That would be correct, except that I am running RAID-0, with a single scsi disk and a scsi controller (before putting in the RAID card) I got no where near 300 MB/s as well

[Ivan Ferreira]

You should consider that Windows is not the best in performance, specially in disk access. You should consider the file system overhead. The performance for the disk is the maximum transfer (I think from controller to disk), but there are other limitations, like O.S. job, file system overhead, etc.

Anyway, I cannot tell you what would be a reasonable performance using Windows. Also, if you are doing a copy, consider that you are reading from and writing to disks, which reduces a lot the performance.

Also, you can try several disk access at the same time. You should search for a "real" tool to monitor the performance.

There are some in the HP site:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=lpg50460&locale=en_US

[tkutil]

I just leased 2 of these and they are very slow. I'm experimenting with RAID5/0 to see if I get a better result. I normally use the DL380 server and that thing flies.