Intermittent Pausing Issue on RAID Card

[hennessy1]

I recently upgraded to a MegaRAID SAS 9280-24i4e card that I use in conjunction with 3 intel 320 series ssd in raid 0. The speed of reading and writing is there through the benchmarks I have performed on the card but at times it seems to lock up the machine. Either when opening a folder or going to my computer it will take sometime to load. It does not happen all the time though so I am not sure what can be causing it.

I did try their fastpath software but that resulted in horrible speeds much lower then even the onboard x79 chipset I have. I have loaded the latest firmware on it as well. The settings I have are usually 128KB stripe size, direct IO, and always read ahead.

I have this on an ASUS p9x79 ws board in one of the 8x slots.

Thank you for any help.

 

[hennessy1]

Anyone have any insight?

 

[Schmide]

Mapped network drives?

 

[hennessy1]

No there are no mapped network drives on this particular computer.

 

[tweakboy]

Try another raid card and see if these pauses happen or not.

did you update latest BIOS, This is not ASUS fault, its the RAID card thats the problem.

 

[hennessy1]

I have the latest BIOS/firmware for the raid card and the motherboard.

 

[Emulex]

1. run the diagnostics, the card may be defective.
2. upgrade the firmware then driver, do not cross-flash!
3. remember these cards run super-hot and if you don't have a fan blowing on it, like a server (200~) then it will overheat and crash.

Want to buy my 9260-8i

 

[hennessy1]

I will try the diagnostics. Are you suggesting reflash the firmware? In terms of the maximum capability of this particular card I would think I am not even anywhere close with only a 3 ssd raid 0 so it should still be on the cooler side right?

 

[hennessy1]

Ok I tried running the diagnostics from the cli interface and I seem to keep getting exit code 0x1.

 

[Emulex]

Send the error to LSI and they will RMA if the code is correct.

and yeah they do go bad.

mostly from using them in desktops where the cooling is not forced like a server.

you want to buy my 9260-8i

 

[mrpiggy]

Well something is odd. Fastpath with my 9265 8i (same ROCs) is much faster with my SSD's than without. Have a RAID boot (2 drives) and RAID0 (3 drives) all with M4's. Using different stripe size, but otherwise the same settings. I use same P9X79 motherboard too. I never experience and pausing or slowdowns.

Maybe try a different breakout cable (or at least check connections)? Intel 320's are SATA2 3Gbps, you check the negotiated link speeds and see if all the same? MMaybe force them to slower SATA1 1.5Gbps just to see if any affect on pauses. FYI, my card is in bottom-most PCIe slot if that makes a difference. Check the airflow? Cards run hot as hell.

My Win driver version is 5.2.127.64

 

[hennessy1]

I will try those suggestions thank you for your help. I am also working with LSI on the issue as well. They want me to run their data capture utility but since these issues I have moved it to another computer to test it so there are no drives which I think it will need to show the data capture.

 

[hennessy1]

I have been talking witwith lsi support but all the things they have had me do such as data dumps and adpater diagnostics have resulted in them saying it is a driver issue. My issue with that is this happens upon a first boot of a clean install and the ms built in driver for the controller or the latest lsi driver installed and all 3rd party drivers and software installed.

If anyone can try suggest somthing else I am open to suggestions. Only insight I know is it happens during a disk instensive procedure i.e. a large software install or large data transfer from one disk on the x79 chipset to the raid card.

 

[hennessy1]

I have run the card now for a full week. The slow downs are still there I am thinking of just switching back to Areca. Yes at times my old areca card could not handle the ssd and hdd raid 0 arrays but it never did this. I ran a backup job from one raid 0 array to a raid 1 array it said it would take over 24hrs for 800GB of data. I could do this backup through the intel x79 chipset and it would take 3hrs tops.

I was thinking of replacing it with this card ARC-1882-ix-24 let me know if that is an adequate replacement though.