First, I have a problem with slow and inconsistent speeds when copying a files. I have an external Seagate USB drive, and when I hook it to my Mac Pro I can copy files to that drive at about 24megs/sec sustained.
When I hook the drive directly to our Dell PowerEdge (Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64), and try to copy a file from our RAID 5 with the PERC 5/i controller, it copies slowly, and very spiky. The file copy time remaining number will be 8-10 minutes for a few minutes, then jump to 100+ minutes for a while, then down to 20minutes.. I know thats normally not a reliable indicator, but it does give you an idea in the long run. If it was a smooth copy it would count down smoothly too. I fired up performance monitor and watched the bytes/sec spike, stablize and spike. The server was pretty well idle (only acting as a DNS and light file server for about 25 users). CPU was idle, except for System which was using 10-35%. I assume this was the CPU controlling the external USB drive and decrypting the data (we use NTFS encryption on the internal RAID partition). It took about 2 hours to copy 44gigs. On my Mac Pro, I could copy that same amount in 30 minutes and it doesnt have a raid card. Just a SATA drive to drive copy.
Any ideas what the problem is? This card should be able to max out an external USB drive. It has 256megs cache on it. I was in device manage and tried to turn on windows caching on the drives but nothing happened. Maybe I need to reboot right after?
I'm looking for updated drivers to maybe help. I've torn dells website apart but they dont have any for the Perc 5/i. At least that I can see. I've seen a few people saying they are just rebagged LSI cards, so I went to LSI, downloaded their GUI manager and it works fine. It can query the card and get some stats from it, and it allows me to run a consistency check and initialize and shutdown drives but thats pretty well all. I tried downloading the driver but when I try to install it I get "The specified location does not contain a compatible software driver for your device. If the location contains a driver make sure it is designed for Windows x64...". The driver I downloaded is for x64, and when I look in the inf it has several mentions of x64. So Im guessing this is not the right driver for the model we have. A website I read says the Dell PERC 5/i is an LSI MegaRAID SAS 8408E, so thats the driver I tried to D/L but it doesnt work.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
When I hook the drive directly to our Dell PowerEdge (Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64), and try to copy a file from our RAID 5 with the PERC 5/i controller, it copies slowly, and very spiky. The file copy time remaining number will be 8-10 minutes for a few minutes, then jump to 100+ minutes for a while, then down to 20minutes.. I know thats normally not a reliable indicator, but it does give you an idea in the long run. If it was a smooth copy it would count down smoothly too. I fired up performance monitor and watched the bytes/sec spike, stablize and spike. The server was pretty well idle (only acting as a DNS and light file server for about 25 users). CPU was idle, except for System which was using 10-35%. I assume this was the CPU controlling the external USB drive and decrypting the data (we use NTFS encryption on the internal RAID partition). It took about 2 hours to copy 44gigs. On my Mac Pro, I could copy that same amount in 30 minutes and it doesnt have a raid card. Just a SATA drive to drive copy.
Any ideas what the problem is? This card should be able to max out an external USB drive. It has 256megs cache on it. I was in device manage and tried to turn on windows caching on the drives but nothing happened. Maybe I need to reboot right after?
I'm looking for updated drivers to maybe help. I've torn dells website apart but they dont have any for the Perc 5/i. At least that I can see. I've seen a few people saying they are just rebagged LSI cards, so I went to LSI, downloaded their GUI manager and it works fine. It can query the card and get some stats from it, and it allows me to run a consistency check and initialize and shutdown drives but thats pretty well all. I tried downloading the driver but when I try to install it I get "The specified location does not contain a compatible software driver for your device. If the location contains a driver make sure it is designed for Windows x64...". The driver I downloaded is for x64, and when I look in the inf it has several mentions of x64. So Im guessing this is not the right driver for the model we have. A website I read says the Dell PERC 5/i is an LSI MegaRAID SAS 8408E, so thats the driver I tried to D/L but it doesnt work.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
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