DL385 bad SCSI performance with 6i controller

[Jose Oliveira_1]

I'm having some trouble with an 6i controller (onboard) with a DL385 and 2 300GB SCSI drives (10000RPM) as a RAID 1 volume. The performance seems very bad at all times, SQL Server runs very slow. The server has 3GB of Memory and Windows Small Business 2003 SP1 installed. The performance is so bad that it's almost the same as the old server, which used 2 SATA drives and had only 1GB of RAM. I've noticed the controller DISABLES the Windows CACHE and there's NO WAY I can turn it on. The impression I have is that the controller's cache is not enough to keep up with the demands of my environment. Does anyone knows of a way to turn on the Windows cache with the 6i controller or how to improve performance on the above describe scenario???
Thanks.
PS: I'm using the LATEST drivers available for the 6i.

[BR894765]

And did you use latest firmware for a controller?
Offline component:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/23684.html
Online:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/23686.html

[Kedd Guyton]

Recently, there was an advisory from HP stating that the Smart Array 6i would usually benefit from a larger stripe size.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00586460

[Jose Oliveira_1]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. As for the firmware, we did use 7.40 CD by the time of installation but curiously, it DID NOT update the firmware to the latest, keeping it at 2.48 version. I´ll update the server to the latest version tonight. Regarding the strip size, I did configure the RAID 1 volume with a 128KB strip size as most of our work will be with large SQL databases. From what I can tell though, only with the 128MB BBWC module I´ll be able to enable write cache on the controller, thus solving the speed bottleneck problem.
Thanks for the help and I wish you all a very nice 2006. Regards. Jose.