DL180 G5 with E200 128MB BBWC performance

[Ryan Richardson_1]

I have a DL180 G5 with the E200 128MB BBWC. I'm finding the performance is only a fraction of what I get on my DL320s with the same type of SATA drives. My question is, does the Smart Array controller make that big of a performance difference? I know the E200 is marketed as entry level, but I didn't expect it to be this slow. The only difference that I can think of are that the DL320s has a P400 with 256MB cache and/or a different SATA backplane/chipset. Has anyone else benchmarked one system using both RAID controllers? (yes, I've tried all different drivers, cache settings, etc)

In this scenario, the DL320s is between 2 and 4x faster according to a benchmark utility:

DL180 G5, E200 128 MB BBWC
-RAID 5 with 3 1TB Seagate Enterprise SATA Drives

DL320s, P400 256 MB BBWC
-RAID 5 with 3 1TB Seagate Enterprise SATA Drives

[Ryan Richardson_1]

to answer my own question, yes, the RAID controller makes a world of difference.

I bought a P400 with 512MB BBWC. Using the same exact set-up, the benchmarks were more than 4x better than the E200.

Disk Mark
E200 w/128MB BBWC = 324.9
P400 w/512MB BBWC= 2119

PassMark
E200 w/128MB BBWC = 65
P400 w/512MB BBWC= 423.8

[Daniele Palumbo]

try to look at this, if it match your config:
http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1220255290404+28353475&threadId=1178606