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tooflyitguy
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April 28th, 2009 11:00
Optimizing Perc 6i Performance
Hi all,
Our company recently made the switch back to Dell, after a year with another brand. We just purchased two PowerEdge R710 servers with the Perc 6i controller, with 6 SAS 15000RPM 450GB disks.
My big concern: In all disk access performance testing, we are getting performance results about 10% slower than our non-Dell system, which used the same 15000RPM SAS drives - 6 of them, yet a different RAID controller - the LSI 8888ELP controller. Here are the configs and results:
Settings similar to both systems:
OS: Win2003 R2 Enterprise 64-Bit SP1
6 SAS 15000 RPM drives, 450GB
Raid 5 configured with two virtual drives, C: and D:
1MB stripe size
Adaptive Read-Ahead set
Write Back set
Testing results:
Sequential Reads: Perc6i: 750-760MB/sec LSI 8888ELP: 800-900MB/sec
Sequential Writes - Load test with 95 GB FIles:
Perc 6i: 87 seconds
LSI 8888ELP: 74 seconds
We are not concerned much with random access, which was pretty much the same, since our application does mostly sequential reads, and one long nightly load process, which is a long sequential write.
Does anyone have any ideas how we can improve the read/write performance on our Dell R710? Maybe some BIOS tweaks? This could slow down our processing...
Thanks!
Mike C.
tooflyitguy
2 Posts
1776
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Posted May 1st, 2009 08:00
Thanks all for your suggestions! I'll test the new firmware first, and report back on the results.
Mike C.
Some years back it was common to use the LSI Windows driver versus the Dell driver maintaining the Dell adapter firmware, almost always providing great stability and performance, you might try that.
Perhaps you original array was aligned .
http://web2.minasi.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=26785
http://www.badkey.com/db/blogsphere.nsf/d6plinks/JWIE-7RLHAT
lockstock12
1 Message
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Posted August 11th, 2009 06:00
Hi Mike,
I find myself with what appears to be an identical config to the one you describe, did you get any improved performance? I am planning to use this box as an Exchange SCR, but Jetstress keeps failing with read latency being too high (over 20ms)
I've gone via Dell support, but so far they can offer me little to no answer.
Cheers,
Luke
pcmeiners
6 Operator
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1771 Posts
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Posted April 28th, 2009 12:00
The LSI 8888ELP and the 6i are the same base hardware.
Is the cache size the same on both adapters?
If you go to 2CPU.com, storage, search on Perc 6i firmware, there are users who flashed with the LSI 8888ELP firmware/use the lsi driver
Get PerfectDisk, do off hour nightly defrags, which will give you a steady 4-5% increase. Bootime defrags can get you >10% increase with particular programs which have open files which can not be defragged with the OS booted, bootime defrag once or twice per month.
Are you sure you want to use a 1 Meg stripe size? If you choose this without careful benchmark/real life testing, likely it is not the correct size. Stripe size choices can affect performance far more then 10%.