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ALL of the posts I have seen about the Dell S130 integrated raid controller that comes in some of their servers is widely known to be "trash".
Not a single post I have seen had anything besides people screaming that it is "trash" and to "Buy a real RAID card".
After dealing with one of these and seeing the abysmal performance, I was thinking the same thing.
Then, after having trouble with a RAID card we ended up having to switch back to the S130 and remake the RAID from scratch.
Now here is the part that is the fix:
Under the settings for the "physical" drives, there is an option to set "write cache" to:
Default
Enabled
Disabled
Come to find out that this is apparently very easily passed over by everyone, and the "Default" setting automatically disables the drive(s) built in cache.
Note: you can go into the physical drive settings and set this AND it also asks about it when you go to create the RAID.
This is completely different then the RAID cache settings, so it MUST be set to Enabled or else your performance will absolutely suck. Why the setting defaults to disabled I have absolutely no idea.
Our final goal was to have a RAID 10 array.
For testing, we made a RAID 1 array and a RAID 0 array. (WD Black and Blue SATA drives)
Upon testing with CrystalDiskMark, we immediately saw that the Read and Write performance had skyrocketed from the original RAID 10 array.
The RAID 1 array was getting about 155MB/s read and 120MB/s Write seq
The RAID 0 array was getting about 313MB/s read and 146MB/s write seq
So then we wiped and set up the array as RAID 10 with the physical drive write cache enabled.
We then got 352MB/s read and 123MB/s write seq.
We then did a comparison mapped network drive test and got:
Previous - with physical drive cache "default - disabled"
103MB/s read and 9.9MB/s write seq
New array with physical drive cache "Enabled"
115MB/s read and 99.5MB/s write seq.
This is over a 1Gb link, so the speeds are what I would expect.
Look at the writes. a 10x performance improvement!
Also, with the default settings, the system would hang every once in a while when it was trying to do stuff... just absolute horrible performance overall. Completely different machine with it enabled.
Not a single post I have seen had anything besides people screaming that it is "trash" and to "Buy a real RAID card".
After dealing with one of these and seeing the abysmal performance, I was thinking the same thing.
Then, after having trouble with a RAID card we ended up having to switch back to the S130 and remake the RAID from scratch.
Now here is the part that is the fix:
Under the settings for the "physical" drives, there is an option to set "write cache" to:
Default
Enabled
Disabled
Come to find out that this is apparently very easily passed over by everyone, and the "Default" setting automatically disables the drive(s) built in cache.
Note: you can go into the physical drive settings and set this AND it also asks about it when you go to create the RAID.
This is completely different then the RAID cache settings, so it MUST be set to Enabled or else your performance will absolutely suck. Why the setting defaults to disabled I have absolutely no idea.
Our final goal was to have a RAID 10 array.
For testing, we made a RAID 1 array and a RAID 0 array. (WD Black and Blue SATA drives)
Upon testing with CrystalDiskMark, we immediately saw that the Read and Write performance had skyrocketed from the original RAID 10 array.
The RAID 1 array was getting about 155MB/s read and 120MB/s Write seq
The RAID 0 array was getting about 313MB/s read and 146MB/s write seq
So then we wiped and set up the array as RAID 10 with the physical drive write cache enabled.
We then got 352MB/s read and 123MB/s write seq.
We then did a comparison mapped network drive test and got:
Previous - with physical drive cache "default - disabled"
103MB/s read and 9.9MB/s write seq
New array with physical drive cache "Enabled"
115MB/s read and 99.5MB/s write seq.
This is over a 1Gb link, so the speeds are what I would expect.
Look at the writes. a 10x performance improvement!
Also, with the default settings, the system would hang every once in a while when it was trying to do stuff... just absolute horrible performance overall. Completely different machine with it enabled.