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Dell CERC RAID card...incompatible drives?
We have a Dell Poweredge 830 server with a dual-core 3.2GHz Xeon, 2 GB RAM, running Windows Server 2003. It has a Dell CERC 6port RAID card. The previous configuration was 2 250GB HDDs in RAID 0 on ports 0 and 1 for the OS and 4 320GB HDDs running in RAID 5 on ports 2-5. Two weeks ago we lost drive #2 (apparently drive #4 died some time ago although there are no traces of this in the logs, and the notification system failed). We have since recovered the data, and decided to upgrade the array. The owner went and purchased 4 WD green 1TB drives. We created a new 3 drive array, RAID 5, on ports 2-4 with a hot spare on port 5. After the array was done building (just shy of a week) we started to copy of recovered data to the new array. However, the array is horribly slow...to the point that a few hundred MB take 10 min or more. And on top of that, larger copies bring the machine to a halt, users get disconnected, and explorer.exe needs to be ended and restarted. It has taken almost another whole week to copy less than 1TB of data. We have enabled write caching, updated the drivers and firmware. We are out of ideas, and any help would be appreciated.
And top it off, just finished a chat with Dell TS and was informed that the drives we chose are not supported by the card (?!???). Does that make sense?
theflash1932
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August 23rd, 2011 09:00
It makes perfect sense. For one, those drives are not even enterprise-class drives. They are not programmed to be able to respond to the many enterprise commands given by most RAID controllers, nor are they programmed with the required specs to work in a RAID array (timings, etc., which are much more stringent when optimized for RAID), not to mention they are only rated for 8 hours of work per day. There can be problems even with some enterprise-class drives if they are not optimized for specific controllers. For example, "certified" drives (which carry a Dell label) have firmware loaded on them that is tuned to work with the many optimized RAID settings of specific controllers. HP and IBM do the same thing. Since none of them actually manufacture their own controllers or drives, this lets them program devices from other manufacturers (like Seagate or Hitachi drives and LSI or Adaptec controllers) to work together seamlessly, in order to be able to guarantee the performance and reliability, and (arguably) to tout the performance and reliability of one over the other.
The CERC is a pretty cheap card, so I doubt there is much in the way of "tuning" on the controller, but you should at least be using enterprise-class drives, and if you value the data/services hosted on this server, you should also be using "certified" drives (again, these are Dell co-branded, but you don't have to buy them from Dell, paying the premium that often comes with it - you can purchase Dell drives from any reputable reseller/supplier for much cheaper than from Dell).
download.intel.com/.../enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf