DL140 Slow Disk Access. Our fix. For Windows 2003.

[Surat_1]

We have solved the DL140 slow disk access for our purposes. We are not experts. We cannot answer any sophisticated questions. We are just reporting a technique we used to solve a problem.

We have 10 x DL140 G3 E5335 servers with dual processors (Intel Quad Code 2.0 GHz) and 4 GB RAM. Hard disks are HP SATA 160 GB 7200 RPM. The servers run Windows 2003.

These servers came with the LSI card installed.

The disk access was very slow.

We disconnected the SATA cable coming from the LSI card.

We then connected a SATA cable from the motherboard SATA connector to the hard disk.

We disabled RAID in Phoenix BIOS. We set the disk access to ENHANCED. If anyone would like to know the exact settings, we can try and upload images of the BIOS settings.

Windows 2003 Standard Edition installed some drivers automatically.

Hard Disk Speed is now perfect!

Please note that we do not need RAID. We do not mind if disk fails and data is lost.

We use our server purely for mathematical processing and not database or any other disk intensive operations. The mathematical processing writes 2 Giga bytes to the disk every few minutes and this was taking almost 1 minute with the LSI card. With our fix it takes between 10 to 20 seconds.

[KarloChacon]

hi

well that is in your answer

no RAID means more speed RAID means apart from RAID 0 (which basically it is not a RAID) RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 6 means tolerance and tolerance means to sacrifice speed

regards

[Surat_1]

Dear Karlo,

Thank you for the response.

Even with the LSI card working we had it with no RAID, or RAID 0 as you refer to. Still the disk access was VERY slow.

Regards,

Surat.

[Mi6t0]

Maybe the Controller is defect or maybe it needs a firmware update... Normally it should work at least as good as the onboard controller.

Regards,

[Surat_1]

Dear Mit60,

On all 10 servers we get the same performance. We have applied all hardware and software upgrades.

Regards,

Surat.

[Joshua Small_2]

Surat,

Note that RAID0 is not "No raid", they are different things.

These cards are generally tuned to perform best when used in the method intended- as a RAID card. You may be experiencing performance issues due to your unusual configuration.

[Pavol Čierny]

Hi,

I've the same problem with HP DL145 G3...

Did you need any other cables to connect the drives to the onboard SATA controller or did you just use the cables that were connected to the LSI controller? I don't have access to the machine now, so I want to now if I should prepare any other cables.

Thank you.