SCSI drive speeds!!!

[pavanbabut]

Hi all,

This is my very first post on this forum and the following issue is the main reason for me to join this forum, till now I am just lurking around whenever I need some help. Anyway we are having 3 Dell Precision workstations 530/650/670 in which 530/670 are having onboard adaptec SCSI controller while 650 is having LSI Logic. The real problem here is the maximum HDD r/w speeds I can get on these systems is around 14MBps using 15K RPM drives. The other difference is 530/650 are having seagate drives while 670 is having Fujitsu drive. On 670, its different, as soon as I install winxp and load the latest aspi drivers (V4.71) I can get speeds of around 77MBps. But on the other systems I am always getting speeds of around 14MBps, no matter if I install a fresh/clean install of XP and load/update the aspi drivers.

I badly need more r/w speeds for our applications.

any suggestions???

thanks,
-Pavan

 

[Oyeve]

Are the drives terminated properly? Are the cables terminated on the ends? Are these LVD/U160 or U320? Using the right multitwisted cables? Cables too long? There are a LOT of factors to consider with SCSI.

 

[pavanbabut]

Yep the cables are the same cables provided by dell and they look fine to me. I have even tested with new multitwisted cable that I got with adaptec PCI-X SCSI controller. They all are U320. The actual cable is not multi twisted one like the adaptec cable, but a flat ribbon cable with terminator at one end (which is connected to HDD). What are other factors you think may be responsible??

thanks,
-Pavan.

 

[Steve]

The LSI system should only be using LSI's ASPI layer, if you're going to use one.

I believe U160 and above requires twisted pair cabling.

 

[pavanbabut]

I couldn't find LSI drivers on their website anymore for LSI 1020/1030, so I am just using the drivers that are being provided by Dell, other than those I couldn't find any latest drivers. Even if I tried to update it with the updated version provided on Dell support page, the system doesn't recognise the driver. Maybe I will try again reinstalling windows with updated drivers.

-Pavan.

 

[The-Noid]

The dirves are not negotiating into Wide. Anything over 80 mb/sec (160, 320) is Wide (there used to be UW80 but then someone realized they didn't need 80 to go wide in about 2002. Go into the bios of the SCSI card, otherwise does one of your drives have a convertor 80 pin to 68 or vice versa that is stopping it from negotiating wide.

 

[pavanbabut]

All my drives are 68pin drives and the controller is also a 68pin connector. I have checked for DIFFSENS voltage level (pin 16) and it shows a reading of 1.339v which is in b/n 0.9v and 1.9v as stated for LVD operation. I have checked the termination voltage (pin 17, 18, 51,52) and is 4.9v which is again in b/n the stated 4.0v and 5.25v. The adapter bios is too vague and there are not much properties in it to change at all. I am not able to even check the bus speed (160/320) in the adapter bios. Does anyone have an updated firmware for LSI Logic 1020/1030 SCSI controller??

-Pavan

 

[Rubycon]

Do you see DOMAIN VALIDATION when the SCSI HBA BIOS is spinning up drives?

I've had this happen before and it turns out it was a bent pin. :Q

 

[pavanbabut]

Sorry, I didn't get u, what do u mean by domain validation. My LSI adapter show only 3 messages, Initializing and then searches the IDs and displays the drives installed and then shows message, LSI Logic MPT boot rom successfully installed, this is all I can see. All of my drives start spinning as soon as they are powered up (i.e the controller doesn't spin the drives), anyway I tired with enabling the drives for delayed start, but tht too didn't help.

-Pavan.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: pavanbabut
Sorry, I didn't get u, what do u mean by domain validation. My LSI adapter show only 3 messages, Initializing and then searches the IDs and displays the drives installed and then shows message, LSI Logic MPT boot rom successfully installed, this is all I can see. All of my drives start spinning as soon as they are powered up (i.e the controller doesn't spin the drives), anyway I tired with enabling the drives for delayed start, but tht too didn't help.

-Pavan.

Domain validation is transparent on LSi HBA - if there's a pause caused by potential signal path issues the user will see it IF the HBA echoes these responses. Since you're stating that you cannot even see the sync speeds upon initialization my guess would be that your HBA is not supporting this feature or is exclusively ignoring it. Something is definitely wrong though. If possible, disable the HBA's BIOS (onboard Dell HBA?) and drop a PCI LSI HBA in there like the one Newegg sells for $36. I keep on on hand to work on drives that need system tools that will not read individual drives in a RAID array and it works good. (and is WAY faster than 14MB/S! )

 

[pavanbabut]

I have tried installing a Adaptec PCI-X SCSI controller card even then the speeds of the drive are same. Even I have tried different drives (Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu), but still the same. I will try upgrading the adapter F/W and then install XP with latest drivers.

-Pavan.

 

[Rubycon]

Hmmm adaptec should be showing sync speeds along with domain validation. Something is really wrong here.

 

[pavanbabut]

Ooops.. I didn't mentioned clearly, I can see sync speeds and all the settings while using adaptec card and even all the settings are normal, the speeds are around the same. According to dell tech support, 15MBps is the actual speeds on their SCSI controllers (this is really weired), if that is the case why will anyone buy their systems with SCSI drives (which cost a lot more than a SATA/IDE and while SATA/IDE can give you far better speeds than their stated SCSI speeds). At the same time I can get 77MBps on 670 system on which they say that 15MBps is the limit for SCSI drive. On the other hand I have built a new system with ASUS P5WDG2 WS-Pro Mobo and 'm using WD Raptor 10k SATA drives and I am easily getting 119MBps in RAID0 and 64MBps in non-RAID config.

This is how Dell Tech support is....!!!!

-Pavan

 

[Rubycon]

Yes I know their support is not the reddest apple in the tree.

I have a PE 2800 in the room running next to me with Maxtor 15K.2 drives in RAID1 on the PCI-E PERC4 with 256MB. I'm going to ATTO it and see what's up.

EDIT:

ATTO results

The test (at least on the reads) obviously is running on the HBA cache. There are no problems with STR on this machine - Dell PowerEdge 2800.

 

[Steve]

I'll bet the driver(s) you need could be here:

http://picsorban.com/upload/lsi10.gif

 

[pavanbabut]

I did a complete reinstall of WinXP using Adaptec controller and now I am able to get only upto 33MBps (a two-fold increase from previous speeds), but it is still low for my applications.
Coming to another issue, the system is Dell PWS 650 with 2x(3.2GHZm 533MHz FSB) processors and 4x(512MB ECC PC2300) DDR ram. I am having 4 PCI/PCI-X boards installed in the system. Three PCI 32bit-33MHz boards and 1 PCI-X 64bit-133MHz board. Among these boards one of the boards (clock generator) doesn't need any bus transfers or full-time interaction with the processor and doesn't need any memory transfers. But two of the PCI 32bit cards are waveform generating boards and they both run at 20MSamples/sec, whihc translates to 40MBytes/sec of transfer per board from the memory (RAM). The PCI-X board (image grabbing board) also need to transfer data to memory at 30fps which translates to 30x1200x512 bytes/sec. So, with this setup, when I am trying to run all the boards at the same time, my waveform generating boards (which give out hardware buffer overrun errors when it doesn't get all the required data) is giving out errors and stops generating. Sometimes either one gives out error or both the boards give the same error. Here is the link for PWS 650 Block diagram. I tried by installing the boards in different slots, but the error shows up all the time. I am not sure if the memory bandwidth or the FSB rate is not enough or both. One more thing I noticed is the waveform generating boards doesn't give out errors if I am not running the image grabbing board. When I run cpu-z, it shows the memory as PC2300-142MHz.
Any suggestion is helpful. I need to setup the system by mid of next month, so if I need to build a new system, then I can order the parts now itself.

thanks,
-Pavan

 

[fire400]

well SCSI drives are far more complex that standard HD's. you need to consider all of the factors, make a chart of what speeds you need, the prices you are going to spend and the compatibility with equipment you already have and will possibly be needing.

cables, software, and drives

check compability with everything

adjust bios tweaks, and ensure that all the equipment that you have is 100% flawless.

once you figure out your budget, search for what speeds are available for the price you want. never lower your standards for SCSI, since you're spending more money, generally, on high performance drives, you want the best that you money can get. you gotta be your own tech support as well, some companies suck at customer service.

you gotta run diagnostics on your SCSI drives periodically, because one glitch can have the system crashing into safe mode speeds and they might still be fast enough for you to not notice anything, but still you gotta be alert at what's going on. if you're doing a raid, keep the drives cool and well ventilated. dell does a good job, but if ur custom building, u gotta do the math yourself.

but I mean, depends how deep you want to go. get stuff that is supported by the companies and add ons that are recommended or ones you know will make a good combo, 'cuz like motherboards and RAM, some of them just don't get along.

 

[pavanbabut]

Thanks for ur reply fire400, I still dont know why this system performs such badly in trasfer speeds. Dell has even replaced the MoBo recently, but still didn't solve the problem. They replaced the drives with no improvement. As I said, I tried using Dell supplied cable and also the cable that I got with the Adaptec controller.

At the end I need a system with atleast 2x32bit PCI slots and 2x64bit PCI-X slots and at the same time I need to have best transfer speeds b/n the slots and the memory and also high hard disk r/w speeds. To say, even if I run all the boards at the same time at their full speeds, I need to have the system running with out any errors (related to slow data transfer). I am looking at SuperMicro X7DAL-E board and H8DC8 board (with SCSI option). Both the boards look good for me, but on the first one, the two PCI slots share the same bus and the two PCI-X slots share the same bus and they all run on South bridge (ESB2 chipset) which also controls the SATA drives and this board supports 2xDual-core xeon processors, 1333 MHz system bus and 667 / 533MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory. While the second one is AMD based and has one PCI slot on one chipset and the other 3 PCI-X slots run on AMD 8132 chipset (one on channel A and the other two share channel B) and the adaptec SCSi controller is connected to the same chipset, the third chipset runs PCI-E x16 slot (which I can use for graphics card and also a LAN port and this board supports 2xDual-core AMD opteron processors, but supports only DDR 400 MHz memory and I am not sure about the system bus speed.

In other words, I am looking for a system with high-end transfer speeds and not a high-end processing.

Which one do you guys think the best one?? and also plz lemme know if you have any other systems that are best suited to my specs.

-Pavan.

 

[Rubycon]

If you're shopping for a new motherboard check out the X7DAE.

We have X5DAE's that have been going nonstop since 2003 with NO problems.

 

[bob4432]

anybody have a link to the atto benchmarking software? thanks in advance

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: bob4432
anybody have a link to the atto benchmarking software? thanks in advance

Text

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn

Originally posted by: bob4432
anybody have a link to the atto benchmarking software? thanks in advance

Text

thanks

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn
Yes I know their support is not the reddest apple in the tree.

I have a PE 2800 in the room running next to me with Maxtor 15K.2 drives in RAID1 on the PCI-E PERC4 with 256MB. I'm going to ATTO it and see what's up.

EDIT:

ATTO results

The test (at least on the reads) obviously is running on the HBA cache. There are no problems with STR on this machine - Dell PowerEdge 2800.

link not working.....

 

[Rubycon]

It was there.

I need a real place to host images.

 

[pavanbabut]

Originally posted by: MS Dawn
If you're shopping for a new motherboard check out the X7DAE.

We have X5DAE's that have been going nonstop since 2003 with NO problems.

Thanks for your reply. I have checked on all supermicro dual-core xeon boards and in all those boards they have 2 pci/pci-x slots sharing the same bus and all the PCI/PCI-X slots are running on south bridge alone. I am not sure if both the boards installed on those pci slots )sharing the same bus) will run at 33MHz each. I would like to have a board on which all the pci slots running at their full speed. Theor xeon boards are excellent on specs using the greencreek chipset and independent memory bus. what do ya think of H8dc8 board??