Poor performance by OCZ Vertex 3 installed in a DELL M610 Blade server with DELL PERC H700.

[Love-Day]

I could not find any definite solution and hence posting this thread in your section . hope you will make a concern in this regard and solve it for me, so to continue with the topic, I am having an DellTM PERC (PowerEdgeTM RAID Controller) along with an OCZ Vertex 3 Solid Sate Drive. There were no issues regarding it as it was fresh buy and so made an installation in a DELL M610 Blade server with DELL PERC H700. I am new to this one and don’t know in the case of settings as it comes into my view that the performance it gives is very slow and it should not be the case. I have it set up as a lone Virtual Disk RAID0. I made then some attempts by setting the write policy to Write Through and this appeared to assist and this is the option which I have tried and I need to ask you guys as what could be the other options should i set. There is something like Stripe Element Size 64 K is default and making changes will render some positive results or not. And regarding the disk they tend to be fine. I used to get some whole bandwidth of the bus effectively . so can you provide some working solutions which will be helpful in my case.

[Vicky Woodley]

First of all , I need to say is that you need to make sure about the spec's for your specific Vertex 3 drive and I suppose that these are re-branded LSI cards, you may discover with a single drive that presentation is improved with a small stripe and it is but obvious that the performance might rely on it's way of use and benchmark type. In addition to this, with a battery backup, you need to go with Always Write Back. And also you are able to live dangerously and set write back anyway, not to risky if you uphold a present image to restore from and according to me , I suppose it will render the best performance as write through has no caching. as well make use of Adaptive/Always Read Ahead as well as "cached IO" in IO policy. You also need to disable the write back read ahead as well as Cached IO might rely on specific controller characteristics.

[Hymavath]

Most of the people generally have issues regarding where and how the settings are configured and most probably on the RAID controller. People do not know this either they enter some wrong settings or are unaware about the SSD market, configurations, and so on. So regarding the settings, these settings to the RAID controller's virtual drive are situated on the similar configuration page. Either in the WebBIOS or else a windows manager. There are no exact SSD configuration modifications , only changes too power profiles and to never permit SSD's to sleep or else have power removed. In addition to this , Have you made some attempts for plugging that similar drive into a standard PC?i need to say that the speeds on a usual controller should be considerably quicker. The PERC controller can be accessed in the boot up post otherwise through Dell's openmanage. It has also been seen that the Perc/LSI controllers are generally very fine. I would carry out a bios update on your system by making use of the Dell's SUU which you are able to download on the support page for your system. I would as well carry out a firmware update on your drive.so you also need to confirm to back up all on that drive first. So hope you got a hint in this issue.

[Amadou]

I was also having same issues and later dell firmware update I was in the confusion regarding the dell firmware update that will I be able to perform the firmware update by means of windows and then make use of these drives as VMFS datastores because the drives have no data on them in any way. But later, after downloading the Server Update Utility I mounted it as a virtual drive by making sue of the ultraiso. And it is wrong concern of updating the firmware update for the Agility 3 drives. And there are less chances that you are able to do that as you are not able to update them if they are your boot drive but otherwise yes. I am also knowing the next round of servers Dell releases will be a little extra SSD friendly but I'm not certain how fine the existing ones support hot swap sled that grasp SSDs. I may construct an array for my primary PC to restore my revodrive but I can afford to take possibility with that. I think when the next round of SF controllers come out, I will make some more tries.

[Dabert]

If you have something to tell regarding the backups, I would propose you run a full nightly backup to disk just to play it safe because you are almost certainly able to afford that . You might by now have that as part of your plan but I considered that I will keep it fresh in your memory. In addition, you should be able to back the whole thing up in 2-3 hours and it gives you satisfaction. I have also came across LSI controllers and I have found that these controllers have been very reliable, My LSI along with the 8xVertex combo has by no means once let me down in almost some couple of years, but the only means to secure your data is a usual backup to at least one more drive. make use of an app which has scheduling backup alternatives, or write your own script or something. In addition also make a note of one thing that though you decide on a primary drive/array though please have a support along with an backup.

[Dannai7]

Ya, regarding the LSI controllers , RAID1E using up to 8 Agility3 120GB drives on LSI 9200-8e along with 9205-8e controllers. And I measured read speeds, these being grave for a data warehouse, by making use of IOMeter among other tools. I did not calculate write speed. The LSI controllers scaled fairly well up to a point. And according to my test it was seen that the controllers are able to push quite a lot of data, but do start to deviate from linear scalability after five disks . For six or more disks, adding up extra controllers is helpful. In a later test, by means of 25 SSD disks along with five controllers, I was able to push 10,800 MB/Secon. It became fairly apparent from my tests that the present generation of RAID cards have throughput boundaries, even when they aren't doing parity computations .