Terrible SCSI RAID Performance--Desparate need of HELP

[dariushou12]

My set up is this:

Adaptec 3400s:
--4 Independent channels

I have set up in RAID 0:

3 Fujitsu ultra160 SCSI 15K Hard Drives in RAID 0 each on its on independent channel
2 Seagate Cheetahs 10K Ultra160 Drives on the last channel

--the fujitsu and cheetahs are two different arrays.

My atto scores (even with casfilter--dynamic and basic drives) are all below 62MB/sec. I've tested the setup with multiple stripesizes and clustersizes (from 8K to 64K for each--for every diffent setup possible). I should be getting well over 100MB/sec with either setup, but i'm not.

Please help. I'm running windowsXP and the 3400s has 128MB of cache. By the way my OS is on its on independent drive on Adaptec 39160 (nothing else is on the 39160).

I'm lost here and need help. THANKS ahead of time

 

[Viper96720]

I think windows xp is the problem.

 

[Pariah]

Terrible Adaptec RAID controller + WinXP = horrible performance. You can try converting your drives to dynamic disks to eliminate the WinXP problem, but there is no way to get around the terrible performance that Adaptec RAID controllers provide.

 

[dariushou12]

What about the Adaptec 39160 SCSI controller. I'm only getting 30MB/sec with that. The 3400s cost over $1,000. I don't believe it could be that bad. I've converted to dynamic disk to no prevail. Something is going on, but i just cant figure it out.

 

[Viper96720]

I found this about XP and SCSI. slow hd performance

 

[Pariah]

There's nothing wrong with Adaptec's SCSI cards, they work great, it's just their SCSI RAID cards that have terrible performance. If you're having problems with the 39160 as well, then XP is most likely causing you some problems. The only thing that can really be recommended at this point would be to move to Win2k SP2.

 

[mechBgon]

What motherboard?

 

[dariushou12]

My motherboard is the Asus P4t533 with the Pentium4 3.06Ghz and 1GB of Rimm4200. Also, i have updated to SP1, but have had no success. My disks are also dynamic. I've looked on storagereview.com and looked at all their comments regarding this matter, too. Termination is fine, writeback caching is enabled in the RAID controller, no conflicts in device manager, and caching is enabled in the device manager for the hard drives. If it was just my RAID card i would think it was the culprit, but my 39160 scsi card also is giving poor performance. Any ideas--i really like XP and NTFS, but hey i didn't buy all of this for poor ass performance. Please help.

 

[mechBgon]

The P4T533 uses the i850E chipset. The i850E chipset's MCH has a little glitch that limits the PCI bus to about 90Mb/sec maximum (see item 5 on page 12 of this PDF at Intel). For starters, try disabling the onboard NEC USB 2.0 controller and see if that frees up some more PCI bandwidth.

If you have an i845PE or GE board around, and some DDR, throw the RAID and/or SCSI card on that and see if it performs better insofar as transfer rate goes too.

 

[dariushou12]

Would this effect the latest P4t533 motherboards? I heard the earlier ones had some problems but the latest ones out were much better. Would a firmware upgrade from Asus fix this--i have the latest now. Also, I need USB 2.0., so disabling it would render USB 2.0 inoperable, right? I have a lot of testing ahead of me. It's going on 3 weeks now. Any more ideas?

Thanks for the info

 

[mechBgon]

Try disabling USB 2.0 temporarily as a fact-finding step.

The bug isn't in the Asus BIOS. It's in the chipset itself. And from what you can read for yourself in the document, Intel said they had no plans to fix this, although you never know. For most people, 90Mb/sec is probably plenty. I'm guessing you're doing some sort of video editing, though? Really, a Xeon setup with a 64-bit 66MHz PCI bus for the SCSI card might be a better bet, and Xeon prices have come down, so you might consider selling your P4/board/RAM combo and migrating to a Xeon board if you're going to do this for the long haul.

Or there's that other chip company too. My nForce 220D board gets over 120Mb/sec throughput from my lowly Adaptec 19160 card, and my nForce2 board will be arriving tomorrow.

 

[dariushou12]

Thanks for the info mechbgon. I'll be testing it all week. But shouldn't I be able to hit 90MB/sec or at least close to it with my set up. Any other ideas of what i can do. Anyhow, ASUS and Intel are going to get an ear full today. Needless to say i'm extremly pissed off about this. Asus shouldn't advertise the board's PCI bus is 133MB/sec when it cannot achieve this. Well, please let me know if you have any more tips.

Thanks Again

 

[sharkeeper]

Let's dismiss the fact (and it is a FACT) that Adaptec RAID HBA's perform like total crap in the STR department.

Some of the best performing HBA's in the likes of LSi, Mylex, Intel/ICP fare quite poorly in a 32/33 slot. These adapters live up to their expectations when running in a 64/66 pci slot. Sad but true. If you want stellar performance, you're gonna have to get a mainboard with 64/66 pci slots. Currently, no board designed for desktop use meets this criteria. There are a lot of workstation and server boards that do and they are priced accordingly.

Cheers!

 

[Pariah]

Here are some benchmarks of the 2100S which is the 3410 minus 1 internal channel and 64bit/66MHz support:

ATTO?s ExpressPCI RAID vs 2100S

The Adaptec card gets trounced across the board by the ATTO card which is a SCSI card using a software RAID driver. Notice that the STR for 2 drives is almost identical to that of one drive. This is not a PCI issue as the ATTO card nor even ATA RAID cards exhibit this problem, it's just terrible performance. Moving this card to 64bit/66MHz won't make any difference as it's the card limiting overall performance.

 

[sharkeeper]

That "review" is horrible. Also, the ATTO card is just a RAID firmware based SCSI card like Promise and Highpoint IDE cards. U160 SCSI can (and does) exceed the PCI bus limitation. The best I've seen from 32/33 PCI was a pair of X15 36LP striped on a 29160. Windows NT 5.1 Software stripe. Max STR R/W was just over 100 MB/S with reads maxing at 110 MB/S. Of course moving the card to a 64 (this card runs at 33MHz which is effectively a 266 MB/S product) made little difference as the card and drives were the limiting factor.

Moving up the scale to a LSi MegaRAID enterprise which is a 64/66 part was a different story. Using 4 X15 36LP drives in RAID 0+0, the max read speed was 115 MB/S and the max write speed was 88 MB/S. Moving the identical setup to a 64/66 slot made the writes jump over 210 MB/S and reads over 180 MB/S! That was not only a noticeable jump in performance, but the overall system "feel" was much better.

Moving further, when 8 drives were connected (2 per channel using all four U160 channels) R/W speeds approached 400 MB/S! That's real performance!

Cheers!

 

[Pariah]

That "review" is horrible.

How do you screw up an HDTach or ATTO benchmark? Would like like to point out what is so horrible about them?

Also, the ATTO card is just a RAID firmware based SCSI card like Promise and Highpoint IDE cards

Ok, let's see what I said above:

"the ATTO card which is a SCSI card using a software RAID driver."

Hmm...same thing, so what's your point?

As for the rest of it, what is it with people posting unrelated info that is of no use to helping the poster fix his problem? Are you going to buy darius an LSI MegaRAID card? He's trying to figure out what is wrong with his Adaptec card. I post a link showing that Adaptec cards are poor performers, and that he is probably stuck with what he has despite his disappointment. You post throughput numbers for NT software stripe and an LSI card using 64bit/66MHz slots, none of which he has, and I wonder why, as that is no help to him.

 

[sharkeeper]

As for the rest of it, what is it with people posting unrelated info that is of no use to helping the poster fix his problem? Are you going to buy darius an LSI MegaRAID card? He's trying to figure out what is wrong with his Adaptec card. I post a link showing that Adaptec cards are poor performers, and that he is probably stuck with what he has despite his disappointment. You post throughput numbers for NT software stripe and an LSI card using 64bit/66MHz slots, none of which he has, and I wonder why, as that is no help to him.

Those numbers are to prove that bus DOES make a difference and affects buying decisions.

His best bet is to return the Adaptec HBA or sell it, and buy a LSi MR Elite off ebay for $300.00. It *will* perform 200% better than the Adaptec, but not at full potential in a 32/33 slot. It's like buying a 600 bhp car and putting skinny 15" tires on it. The adaptec is like buying a bicycle! :Q

HD Tach is useless for testing RAID arrays. Only access time is accurately reported. If I were to use that to gauge my logical drive performance, I would sell of that stuff and buy a 2000JB.

Ok, let's see what I said above:

"the ATTO card which is a SCSI card using a software RAID driver."

Hmm...same thing, so what's your point?

The Adaptec is a hardware solution! Do you need hardware to stripe drives? No. Can the ATTO support multiple logical drives? No.

It sounds like this person wants a system that performs. The above recommendation WILL perform and at lower cost. It also opens up the opportunity to support mixed RAID levels and the like. Sounds like a no brainer to me!

Cheers!

 

[Pariah]

Those numbers are to prove that bus DOES make a difference and affects buying decisions.

You're arguing with yourself. Who said it didn't? I said it didn't with the specific Adaptec products we are dealing with. When you are running a 3 15k drive RAID 0 array and maxing at 62MB/s, the 32/33 PCI bus is not the problem. So why do you keep going back to that?

His best bet is to return the Adaptec HBA or sell it, and buy a LSi MR Elite off ebay for $300.00.

I agree, which is what you should have said in the first place.

HD Tach is useless for testing RAID arrays. Only access time is accurately reported. If I were to use that to gauge my logical drive performance, I would sell of that stuff and buy a 2000JB.

It depends on the RAID implementation. You seem to be ignoring the ATTO benchrmarks which mirror what the HD Tach numbers show. Coincidence? The rest is purely your opinion as there is useful info that can be gleaned from HD Tach with respect to system health whether or not you can see it.

The Adaptec is a hardware solution! Do you need hardware to stripe drives? No. Can the ATTO support multiple logical drives? No.

So what, once again I don't see the relevance to darius's problem. I don't disagree with most of what you said, I just don't see any connection to Darius's problems in it. Maybe it's just me, as I do respect your knowledge here as much as any other member.

 

[sharkeeper]

Actually I've found HD Tach does not do well on high end SCSI HBA's. My arrays (which do 220 MB/S in ATTO) show 35 MB/S constant read across the disk. WB99 shows 209 MB/S begin, 168 MB/S end.

Well the lower numbers (my LSi was also much lower too!) on 32/33 may not be caused by PCI's theoretical limitation of 133 MB/S something is going on here. I got nowhere near the transfer on a 32/33 vs. 64/66 pci slot. My thinking is the HBA's are best suited for 64/66 and 32/33 (as well as 64/33) is just available for compatibility reasons.

BTW, if this person is using four channels and performance is that bad, that's truly sad. (purely Adaptec's fault)

Cheers!

 

[dariushou12]

I forgot to add this, which may mean that my motherboard (Asus P4t533 (not-c)) is not limited to just 90MB/sec. When i ran ATTO with a file size of 4MB i was hitting right over 100MB/sec, but this was probably due to the 128MB of cache on the SCSI RAID Controller. To get the true performance of the Hard Drives you should set the file size at 32MB, which is where i get awful performance. However, this should rule out the 90MB/sec problem stated earlier with my motherboard--i think?? The motherboard i have is a later P4t533 which was not suppose to have as many bugs as the earlier ones.

Couple of quick questions:

What does HBA stand for and what do you mean by "Can the ATTO support multiple logical drives? No"

Thanks Again for your help. by the way how many channels does the Lsi Mr. Elite have?

 

[sharkeeper]

HBA = Host Bus Adapter. Short for SCSI card.

Yes if you're getting more consistant results with lower block sizes in ATTO that could mean the test runs completely inside the cache. If I turned write back cache to high on my controller, I don't even see any SCSI drive activity lights which means the entire test is running in cache. Not accurate! Can you see the LED's on your drives? That will tell you whether or not the cache on the HBA is tricking the tests. 90MB/S is not an unreasonable figure for a max on a peripheral living on the 32/33 block. Everyone must share!

High end HBA's allow multiple logical drives to be created. For example, if I have four 37 GB disks I can create a 20GB RAID0 logical disk 0 and an 88 GB RAID5 logical disk. Windows will see them as two hardware volumes. In setups like that, it's always good to have at least one drive in the dedicated global hotspare pool. This allows a RAID5 LD to rebuild automatically in case of drive failure using parity stripes from the remaining good disks.

The LSi MR Elite is a two channel HBA, the Enterprise is a four channel HBA that has two channels available internally and all four available externally.

Cheers!

 

[dariushou12]

What do you think about the Mylex extremeraid 2000? Have you heard anything about this card?

Thanks Again

 

[sharkeeper]

What do you think about the Mylex extremeraid 2000? Have you heard anything about this card?

Excellent choice.

I mainly recommend the LSi's because of their availability and cost.

Cheers!

 

[mastertech01]

I have several ATTO RAID controllers, one of which is the UL3D. From my experiences with Adaptec prior to aquiring the ATTO controllers, the Adaptec Raid cards were dogs in comparison. The UL3D with 4 X15 36LP drives on its two channels often would hit 170+MBPS on a 64bit 33MHZ PCI slot on a dual Athlon board.

I believe your primary problem here is the 32bit slot. I also have had the P4T533 with RIMM4200, and the same ATTO controller still performed as well as you are reporting with only 2 drives in the ATTO ARRAY. This was using either Win2k advanced server or XP PRO with dynamic disks.

Although I have heard that the latest Adaptec controllers with certain Intel chipsets have been much improved over the prior controllers, it would be a cold day before I would go back to Adaptec without seeing the marked improvement in person. And even then, I consider that the U320 version of the ATTO is less costly than the controller you have now, so I really doubt I would go any route but the ATTO personally.

I highly recommend you try Dynamic disks with XP, it will show marked improvement doing that alone. Consideration of a board with 64bit PCI slots would not be a bad idea either.

 

[dariushou12]

I have tried both dyanamic disk and basic disks with WindowsXP and they both give similar poor results. I should be getting right over 100MB/sec with my setup. I wish i could get a 64bit PCI slot, but they usually don't have the right AGP slot or enough pci slots (i need 6--can do with 5 though), also they are usually xeon and not P4 with rimm4200 rdram. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Well, it looks like i'm going to be doing a lot of testing this weekend. If i don't get the results i should expect, it looks like mylex. Any ideas in the meantime are greatly appreciated.