HPE Gen10 Plus with HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid - Help

[denis3]

Good morning,

I have just purchased a Proliant MicroServer Gen10 Plus Spec'd as follows :-

• 1x Intel Xeon E-2224 4 Core Processor

• 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM

• 1 x Samsung EVO NVMe 970 (500gb)

• 4 x WD Gold 16tb Sata Drives 

Upon setting it all up, I went with Windows Server 2019 and tested the NVMe speeds and all looks perfect (Over 3000 read and write) in CrystalDiskMark - so was happy this end. Setting up the RAID using the built in "HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid" using RAID-5, all again went well and i had 48TB (ish) usable in Windows.

Here's where the fun started. I tried sending a file from the NVMe to the RAID and noticed the speed starts off around 150mb/s but within a few seconds, it drops to a crawling 10mb/s on sending a 10gb.bin test, 20gb.bin test etc. Also got a USB3 stick and sent a large file and again starts around 150mb/s and drops to 10mb/s. Having googled this, i read about the Windows Server 2019 Raid speed woes so thought i'd try some more tests.

Server 2019

• As above using the HPE software RAID - 10mb/s speed

• Disabled the HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid and tried Windows Storage Pools - 10mb/s speed

• Disabled the HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid and tried creating a RAID 5 in Disk Management - 20mb/s ish, a slight bit better.

After concluding 2019 would just NOT work i tried Server 2016 :-

Server 2016

• As above using the HPE software RAID - 10mb/s speed

• Disabled the HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid and tried Windows Storage Pools - 30mb/s speed (a touch better)

• Disabled the HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid and tried creating a RAID5 in Disk Management - 140-150mb/s - performance as expected.

So having tried these Server variants and each way, almost all are terrible speed aside the last one. What am i missing here? I have gone to the HPE Smart Array S100i SR Gen10 SW Raid drivers page, and tried EVERY driver version, no difference. I did ideally want to use the built in HPE raid but just cannot get any decent speed aside this last option. Any suggestions on something else to try to get the speeds to how I've currently got it in Win 2016?

Any advice welcomed.

0 Comments

[BPSingh]

Greetings!

As per the server specification, I can see below.

Maximum Internal Storage
• Non-hot plug SATA
16TB (4 x 4TB) 3.5" SATA HDD

Compatible SATA drives are listed on page# 16

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getdocument.aspx?docname=a00073554enw#

The Technical Specifications for these drives can be found on the web-link below.

https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/a00001287enw.pdf

Also don't see NVMe as an option in the server quickspecs.