Terrible write performance on third party SSDs on P840 and P440 in Gen9

[EsonG]

There seems to be some kind of issue with the new range of Gen9-controllers and Intel SSDs. I have tried three different Intel SSDs, 520, 530 and S2500.

If I disable the cache I get about 20MB/S seq write and 200 IOPS with 4k Q32. It doesnt matter if I run 8 SSDs in RAID0, RAID1, RAID6 or if I run a single disk in RAID0.  I get the same terrible perfomance using SSD Smart Path as well.

Putting the controllers in HBA-mode and testing them one by one or in Storage Spaces for example they perform as they should. 

Spoke to HP but they werent much help since Im using non-HP SSDs. Havent had any issues before with for ex. P822 and Intel SSDs. 

Anyone else tried a setup with any of the above controllers and third party SSDs? Im running this on Server 2012 R2 on a DL380 Gen9 and have performed test with both the P440 and P840.

[TVVJ]

Hi

3rd party hard drives do not have the same firmware as HP branded drives and hence they may function sub-optimally when connected to HP Smart Array controller(s). Try with HP branded drives supported on by the server and check for performance. If there are any issues, then this needs to takenup with HP Support. Hope this helps!!

Regards,

Vijayasarathy

[JohnRB]

Turn off HP Smart Path for the ssd array. After I did that I got 4 times the performance.

[Iljitch]

In case that someone finds this useful:

After struggling for weeks I found that at least HP Proliant Servers DL320e G8 / Gen8 and DL160 G9 / Gen9 have a poor writing performance with Kingston SSDs (DC400 in my case) when the embedded Intel SATA controller is configured as "plain" AHCI or as SATA Legacy (IDE). The former misbehaviour does not ocur with magnetic hard disks.

Changing the mode to HP RAID (a.k.a. software / fake RAID) solved the writing speed issue for SSDs, just let the disks "unconfigured" in the storage administrator; no logical drives, arrays  or whatsover were created.

By the way, this same situation arises with Lenovo Servers RD350, but this hardware has relatively "decent" writing performance in IDE mode and probably (not tested yet) also in software / fake RAID mode. Incidentally the RD350 has an embedded Intel SATA controller as well, which leads me to believe this is a bug of several Intel SATA controllers, since the servers I tested have different controller models and obviously the problem is multi-vendor (HP and Lenovo to my knowledge).

It is worth mentioning that everything was verified in Windows 2012 Server and Oracle Linux 6 and 7 ( Red Hat / RHEL / CentOS). Do not forget to keep BIOS and storage controllers firmware updated.

[Mikki-10]

By default the controller might also have disabled the SSD's write cache, try also to enable that.