Areca 1680LP initialization speed

T

tgrimley

Limp Gawd
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May 1, 2006
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Built a 4TB RAID6 (4x2TB Hitachi) array off this card through an expander in 040:47:14. Seems like an awfully long time. I didn't take notes, but I think I built the same config off a SFF8087->SATA cable in about 12-15 hours. Does anyone else have a data point to verify that 40 hours seems extreme?
 
Took me 15 hours for a 20 drive RAID 6 on my 1680i with the HP SAS expander with 2TB Hitachi drives.
 
I've built 15 x 2TB WD RE4-GP RAID 6 arrays with 1680ix in about 10 hours. It makes a big difference whether the individual HDD disk caches are on or off for the build time -- off makes it take 40 - 50 hours (extrapolating, never left it going for more than a few minutes).
 
background or foreground? A foreground init took around 9-10 hours for me but a background took multiple days.
 
5 1.5 TB WD GP drives took about a day and a half for me. I was also initializing another RAID 5 array at the same time so that might have impacted it as well. Both were background.
 
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That was a foreground initialization. So it must be the expander (LSILOGICSASX36 A.1 7015) or the cable. Those are the only two things that changed. Has anyone experienced a bad quality SFF8087 cable limiting the speed like that?
 
I did a test RAID5 setup on 4 WD20EADS 2TB drives after I upgraded the firmware and reprogrammed them with WDTLER and WDIDLE3 and the initialization in foreground mode took just over 5h on an Areca 1680i with HP SAS expander. I was also checking temperatures and various other settings on the other 44 drives on the same controller during the initialization phase! The firmware update is supposed to have optimized sequential write performance. I did some testing with HD Tune before and after the upgrade but haven't compared the data yet to see if it really made a difference. I think it did make a difference as two out of the 4 drives had a slightly older firmware as I was testing them in different stages. The RAID set completed with the two drives with the latest firmware finishing about 15min before the two with the slightly older firmware.
 
I just recently got an Areca 1680i and HP SAS Expander. Took me 6 hours to initialize a 6 x 2 TB Hitachi RAID6 array, and 4 hours to do an 8 x 1 TB WD Caviar Black RAID 6 array. I was using foreground initialization and forced the hdd cache to enabled. If you have a battery and leave it set to auto, it will disable it by default. This was also with the HDDs running at SATA 150 since my HP SAS Expander was still at firmware 1.0 at the time.
 
Ah, the battery must be it. I've added a battery since I built the first time. I changed from the default to enabled and rebooted and it seems to be progressing much faster. When I checked the volume it says it was enabled, but apparently it wasn't actually. Excellent tip!
 
tgrimley said:
Ah, the battery must be it. I've added a battery since I built the first time. I changed from the default to enabled and rebooted and it seems to be progressing much faster. When I checked the volume it says it was enabled, but apparently it wasn't actually. Excellent tip!
Click to expand...

There are two caches, array (controller) cache and HDD cache. The one from the volume status screen is probably the array cache.
 
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