problem with ST32000444SS drives

xeonMP

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 2, 2008
Messages
108
Hello,

I recently purchased 24x ST32000444SS to use on my areca 1680ix-24 and I built a 23 drive + 1 hotspare raid 6 array it initialized in 6 hours and I did some testing with dd and the write speed was around 1.1GB/s however the read speed was only 300-400MB/s.

I did some further testing and broke the raidset and created a 5 drive raid 0 and read/writes were around 700MB/s.

So it seems that having a lot of the ST32000444SS drives on a single raidset/volume causes the read speeds to suffer dramatically.

I also created enough different raidsets/volumes for 5 drives in raid 0 to test all the drives and all were able to get around 700MB/s read/writes.

I should also note that I did not have this problem with my previous ST31000340NS sata drives.

Any ideas? Thanks
 
Stripe-size? How did you test performance? Did you enable adaptive read-ahead?
 
Stripe-size? How did you test performance? Did you enable adaptive read-ahead?
I'm using 128k stripe which is the max on the 1680 card.

I tested using dd and I tested with and without a filesystem.
 
1. any particular reason you spent big bucks on enterprise drives? is this for business or personal use? if for personal use then for the same money you could've gotten two sets of desktop class drives and duplicated all your files to the second set, and still had money left over.

2. if you really care about performance then with that kind of investment in SAS-2 drives it's a crime not to run an Areca 1880ix-24 or Areca 1880i + HP SAS Expander. I'd love to see Areca 1880 benches with native SAS-2 drives.

As for why read performance appears low, you haven't given nearly enough info and its hard to speculate based on what you have given. For starters the integrated expander on that 1680ix is not great and holding things back somewhat, but you should still be able to pull somewhere between 700-900MB/s sequential reads on > 1GB files, depending on which bench you're using. If you step up to an 1880 series card you WILL see double the throughput - I get 1500MB/s sequential read with SATA-II drives, FFS.
 
1. any particular reason you spent big bucks on enterprise drives? is this for business or personal use? if for personal use then for the same money you could've gotten two sets of desktop class drives and duplicated all your files to the second set, and still had money left over.

2. if you really care about performance then with that kind of investment in SAS-2 drives it's a crime not to run an Areca 1880ix-24 or Areca 1880i + HP SAS Expander. I'd love to see Areca 1880 benches with native SAS-2 drives.

As for why read performance appears low, you haven't given nearly enough info and its hard to speculate based on what you have given. For starters the integrated expander on that 1680ix is not great and holding things back somewhat, but you should still be able to pull somewhere between 700-900MB/s sequential reads on > 1GB files, depending on which bench you're using. If you step up to an 1880 series card you WILL see double the throughput - I get 1500MB/s sequential read with SATA-II drives, FFS.
I got a good deal on the drives so they weren't too expensive.

I'm thinking about getting an 1880 card actually I just wanted to try these out on my 1680 to see what kind of performance I'd get.

Like I said with 5 drives I can reach 700MB/s reads and writes using 50GB and 100GB files but using all the drives makes the reads turn into crap while the writes still remain good.

I was able to get 800-900MB/s with 23 of my ST31000340NS sata drives so I know this card is capable just not sure what's going on with these new drives.
 
Did you try a 20x drive RAID 0 array? I'd just be interested to see how high you can go on the 1680 versus the new 1880 that you are probably going to get :)
 
Did you try a 20x drive RAID 0 array? I'd just be interested to see how high you can go on the 1680 versus the new 1880 that you are probably going to get :)
Same as 23 in raid 6 300-400MB/s read 1.1GB/s write.

I can get 1GB/s read and write with 8 drives in raid 0 or 6 however.
 
Just wanted to post again and clear up some possibilities.

I have tried multiple driver versions default in linux kernel and newest source code I have the latest firmware and all drives have the same firmware except for one however I've already tried excluding that and the same issue occurs.

I've tried testing every drive in it's own 5 drive array and every time it's capable of getting 700MB/s read+write the issues -only- occur when adding more than about 8 drives to a single raidset/volume.

All I did was swap my ST31000340NS with the new drives and create a new raidset/volume etc.

The settings are all right and I can get 700MB/s read+write with 5 drives in raid 0 or 6.

I will say again my ST31000340NS drives had no issues getting 800-900MB/s area read+write with 23 in raid 6 the only difference here are the drives.
 
Hi,

from two weeks i struggling with 8 pcs of ST32000444SS drives in HP DL180G6 server and HP SA P410/512 BBWC controller. The benchmark results are tragical - 8x ST32000444SS in RAID6 giving 70-90MB/s in large file copy test, 20-90MB/s in hdparm -t test under ubuntu and 5-15MB/s in HDTune 2.55 under Windows 2008 R2 Server x64.

I contact with Seagate support and they send me right now firmware 0006 (my disks are delivered with 0005). For me that changes nothing - but maybe it can help you.

I used previously Seagate NS and ES drives with smaller sizes (500GB/750GB) in the same server DL180G6 and same controller getting about 180MB/s in internal large file copy and normal results from HDTune 2.55 tests

I tried also with HP SA P400/512BBWC and even HP SC44ge simple HBA with RAID0 (4 disk) every time same results. What is funny HP also selling same or simliar disks(2TB SAS 6G 7200rpm) but of course at unreasonable price (3 times more). Unfortunately i dont have HP 2TB SAS for tests.

Also pls note that Seagate finally capitulate with the solving problem and suggest me to send it for repair if i'm still thinking that something wrong with these disks.

Finally i own 3ware (LSI) 9750/8i/512BBWC controller and get 450MB/s in hdparm -t under ubuntu, and about 340MB/s in hdtune 2.55 and some about 180-230MB/s in real life large file copy,

By the way there are also problems with Seagate Constellation 2TB SATA drives. No so radical but also something is wrong.

Hope this will help you some. If you don't get the firmware from Seagate give me an info. Also pls note that upgrading this firmware is really tricky.
 
Well, I'm having a relatively good experience with ST32000444SS drives. I'm using them on a LSI 9280 4i4e via Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander. The drives are on firmware 0006 and were delivered to me like that.

RAID 0, two drives: 266MB/sec Write, 278MB/sec read
RAID 0, 4 drives: 523MB/sec Write, 571MB/sec read

RAID 1, two drives: 139MB/sec Write, 258MB/sec read (parallel reads)
RAID 1 during a rebuild, two drives: 169MB/sec Write, 137MB/sec read

RAID 10, 4 drives: 296MB/sec write, 509MB/sec read (parallel reads)


The 2 drive RAID 0 volume was about 50% full (2TB NTFS partition on 4TB volume, NTFS partition full). The 4 drive one was empty.

The RAID 1 volume was about 97% full in both tests. I think I did the first test with a smaller strip size (64KB vs 1MB). I also probably had drive cache turned off on the first R1 test, it was enabled for the second.

Benchmark was with ATTO, running with a 2GB total length (to lessen impact of cache on RAID card), overlapped i/o, qd of 4. OS is Win2k8 R2.
 
Last edited:
Hi,

finally I resolve my problems with ST32000444SS in HP DL180G6 with HP SA P410/512BBWC controller.

The problem solution has two part:

1. When setting up HP server ALWAYS use so called "Firmware CD" includes Smart Update software. Most important element of this software is searching for firmware and drivers not only on HP web but also HP FTP. There are newer driver for HP Smart Array Controllers on FTP then normally published on hp website. The right driver is from august 2010 with number 6.20.2.64 and on website are only 6.20.0.64 from march 2010.
This solving the problem with very bad synthetic tests results (5-15MB/s) and live copy speed no more then 70MB/s in different RAID levels

2. Second part of solution is to understanding that HP SA P400/410 controllers are not really suitable for RAID6 in case of performace.

For RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, RAID50 you can get performance from 160MB/s up to 370MB/s vary on RAID config
The parity initialization for RAID5, RAID50 takes 5-7 hours on 11TB volume.

For RAID6, RAID60 you can get performance from 70MB/s up to 110MB/s.

Also the parity initialization for RAID6, RAID60 takes over 90 hours (sic!) on 11TB volume.

Resume:
HP SA P400/410 is not suitable for RAID6/60 in my opinion.

For RAID6 configs use controllers from different manufacturers like 3ware (tested but still parity initizlization takes 60 hours) or LSI, Areca (not tested). Maybe HP SA P600/P800 are more effective but i dont test it.

Hope it helps someone.
 
My issue resolved itself awhile back.

I woke up the next day and dd was reporting 1.3GB/s reads and writes consistently for 23x 2TB in raid 6 using 100GB files for testing.

I'm cpu limited at that so not sure if it is capable of going higher.
 
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