DL385 Smart Array 6i write performance poor

[JoePub]

Hi,

I have a few DL385's that I am trying to set up with omtimum performance. I have been testing the write speeds of the SCSI U320 HDD that are on the SA 6i and I am disapointed with the results. I have updated the firmware on the SmartArray to the latest (2.58 i think) and still acheive poor performance on write.

I am currently testing a single SCSI drive which is not in a RAID set. My write performance seems to be only around 9MB/s, as opposed to a cheap external IDE drive that I can get 40MB/s with.

Read speeds are in excess of 70MB/s which I am happy with.

I am running Win2k SP4, does anybody know what the problem might be?

[Oleg Koroz]

is BBWC used ?
settings ? Read Write ?
What size of the Drives ? Partition ?

[JoePub]

It is a HP (Compaq) 36GB U320 SCSI Drive with a single NTFS partition, BBWC is not being used currently

Read Speads at start of drive in excess of 90MB/s

Write speed around 9MB/s

Thanks

[Igor Karasik]

I think BBWC adding will significantly improve write performance.

[JoePub]

I do find that the need for a battery backed write cache dissapointing, but enought of my rant.

Is there a way to improve the speed without the need for BBWC as the data on this drive does not need to be reliable in anway if a power loss in ocurred as it is used as a temporary storage and the files that are stored on there although large, have a low life expectancy.

[Ari Hietamaki]

We have a same problem with 6i. All tho we are running Vmware ESX 2.5.2 with HF3. 50%/50% 2x146/Raid1 and 4x146/raid10. We did bought the BBWC, but still if I copy 8GB file from raid1 set to 10 it will take 40 minutes... that's poor. Raid 1 is faster than 10 set in this dl385 computer. Any ideas ? Latest ROM updates is all ready done.

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I've seen the same problem on a redhat box.
Without the additional component (Battery-Backed Write Cache (BBWC)) mentioned the raid controller will not activate caching.

cpqacuxe -c from cpqacuxe-7.50-23.linux.rpm reports:
; Controller Specifications
; Controller HP Smart Array 6i
Controller= Slot 0
ReadCache= 100
WriteCache= 0
RebuildPriority= Low
ExpandPriority= Low
SurfaceScanDelay= 15

you will need to find the appropriate module for your server.

Bill

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

this is the part: http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?sku=2552852&extended=1

[amhutap]

Any performance benchmarks available with and without the BBWC?

thanks