Ultra Slow DataStore Transfer speed - ESXi on a HP DL120 G7

Beating my head trying to figure this out --

In a test environment I'm running ESXi 5.1 (was on 5.0 - same issue) and all data transfers to the datastore are hilariously slow. They top out at about 2.5KB/s.

Hardware :
HP ProLiant DL120 G7
Datastore : Internal 4 disk 4TB SATA RAID10 array on a P410 controller
RAM : 16GB Unbuffered ECC
CPU : Xeon E3-1230
Boot Device : 8GB Class10 SD-Card (onboard reader)

Done so far:
- Tested drive speed with HDDTune in a Portable WinXP environment - got average of 180MB/s.
- Tested Network Transfer speed as well - saw over 90MB/s sustained.
- Installed NIC that is know to work well with ESXi [Intel 1000 CT PCI-e]
- Tried using vCenter Browser, scp via ssh, FastSCP and VMWare Standalone Converter - all have the same terrible results.

I am aware the DL120 G7 is NOT on the approved hardware list, and there are 2 small BIOS changes that needed to be done to enable installations (related to the Power Management side of things) but all successful Windows/Linux based testing on the hardware has been done with these settings already changed.

I've done 3 clean installs of ESXi just to insure I haven't left some diagnostic-changes active that are affecting things.

Anyone have any ideas, or testing I can do within the VMWare system to test the performance to narrow down the trouble?

I'm betting the P410 in your server does not have battery backed write cache module. Take a look at this from HP HP ProLiant DL120 G7 Notice

I saw the same thing on my DL380 G6 servers with the P410 controller and 256KB non battery backed cache module. Upgrade to the 512KB battery cache, or one of the flash backed cache options. That will enable write caching and tremendously increase speeds.

Battery backed cache module can be found various places online for much cheaper than HP sells them. Shop around for sure.

Hmmmm, I'll pull the BBWC off another P410 and see if that solves it. I really don't want to run off the integrated B110i in IDE emulation

Thanks.

Fantastic - that works. Getting 70-90MB/s now.

Thanks

no BBWC makes hte P400 series cry. It won't even keep up with ESX Classic logging. (no joke).