searching SAS HBA Controller with Power Management

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DasMarx

n00b
Joined
Mar 21, 2011
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15
Hello,

i am using an Intel SASUC8i right now with 8 Sata HDDs connected with IT Firmware.
The card does not support HDD-Spin down or staggered spin-up with SATA drives.

To change that, i am searching a SAS Controller, which offers the following:

-HP-SAS Expander compatible
-Sata spin down / staggered spin up in JBOD / IT-Firmware Mode
-no special RAID features needed because of use of Flex-Raid

Thank you for any tipps :D
 
I am looking for this as well. Would an HBA work as well(and be cheaper) because there is no need for raid?
 
I am still searching one Controller that suits my needs.
If you guys know anything, please tell me about it.
 
Still searching for a Controller.

I think the Areca 1680 should do the job but is actualy pretty expensive.

Does anyone know something about the cheaper LSI cards? Do they support spin-down in IT-mode?
 
All the LSI based controllers I've used only supported spin-down of hot spares, Adaptec(5 & 2 series but these are RAID models but they support JBOD on the same firmware, possibly others) and Areca support spin down and I think some Highpoints also do making them and the entry level Adaptecs probably the most inexpensive choices.

I'm currently switching over from LSI to Adaptec and from RAID 5/6 to flexRAID(I will be using RAID 0 arrays under it as I need performance on some of the storage) in my server for the power savings. I just put my first Adaptec controller online yesterday (not counting the integrated one-which doesn't offer the same power saving and performance enhancements) so far I'm like it, all the drives on it are currently powered down as they're not in use, I did test on my new M4 SSD on it and one of my LSI controllers and it showed better performance enhancements on ATTO Bench (see pics below). The one thing I didn't like is it doesn't send smart data to hard drive sentinel and WHS disk management plug in(temp display) on non RAID 5/6 arrays like my LSI controllers did.

Here's the M4 SSD on the LSI 8888ELP note this only a 3gb/s controller not a 6 gb/s like the M4 SSD, the contoller has RAID firmware not IT so I created a single disk RAID 0 array, this is w/ performance enhancements enabled(controllers cache, read ahead, etc.) I also ran a test w/ everything off and got just slightly higher number than you'd expect.
m4onlsi8888elp.png


Now on the the Adaptec 51645 but just initialized the drive as JBOD, I didn't run a test yet w/ any performance enhancements turned off.
m4onadaptec51645.jpg
 
I am using the ARC-1680i in combination with two HP SAS expanders in my 100TB server. I also use FlexRAID and the ARC-1680i is setup in JBOD mode (in essence I am using the RAID controller as a dumb HBA). The only way I got the spin-down feature to work is with the ARC-1680i controlling the amount of time that passes between accesses to spin-down the inactive drives. The controller handles the spin-down quite nicely, but the wake-up is an issue for me. It handles individual drives just fine (takes about 10 seconds to respond), but when the OS needs to access all the drives (e.g. during a OS shutdown), the controller wakes up the first drive, waits for a response from the drive that it is ready to be accessed, then moves on to the next drive and repeats this process. These drives take an average of about 10 seconds each from the time the controller sends the wake-up command until the drive signals the ready state to the controller. This doesn't sound to bad, but if you multiply this by 48 drives (48 out of the 50 drives are connected via the ARC-1680i and the two HP SAS expanders in my server), that results in 480 seconds or 8 MINUTES! So a shutdown takes over 8 minutes to complete! I have been searching for a way to do a parallel wake-up rather than a sequential wake-up but have yet to find a solution to my problem. If anyone out there knows a way to change that, I would very much appreciate your insight into this. If I remember correctly, I had asked Areca about this but have yet to see a reply from them on this issue...
 
@treadstone, what do you have you're spin up set at? Does it help if you set it higher or off all together(if you PSU can handle it)?
 
@lovemyram4x4: IIRC I think I have the spin-down set for 15 Minutes right now. Since this is for Blu-ray storage only anyway, most drives are powered down the majority of the time. The server has 4 redundant 600W power supplies with 1620W maximum load capacity, so there is no issue in terms of power. During initial boot-up of the server (from a cold start) while all drives are spinning up, the server draws in excess of 1100W and then settles down to around 350W when all drives are in sleep mode. That's with all 10 high performance fans still running at maximum capacity. The fans alone draw about 120W-150W so once they are lowered, the system draws just under 200W.
 
So you're not using stagged spin up? Aside from the 10 sec thing I was thinking that if you was using staggered spin up by setting to allow more drives or turning it off all together it would at least cut down on waiting for each drive to come up 1 after the other.

I just tried accessing drives that were powered down on my Adaptec controller and it came up right right away, it was quicker than I thought it would be on the mechanical drive, I just turned off the slow down(stby) option just in case it was stopping the power off option from kicking in and will retest later.
 
I tried staggered spin-up, but the HP SAS expander doesn't seem to support this feature and all drives power up right when power is applied. When the drives are connected to the controller direct, this feature works just fine but once the HP SAS expander is in line the drives simply power up when power is applied.
If I access a single drive out of the drive pool and all drives are in sleep mode, it takes approximately 10 seconds for the drive to come online. Most of the time, the directory etc is cached so the response appears to be almost instant, but if you try to actually access data on the drive, you have to wait the 10 seconds before the data will be available.
When I access the disk manager tool and it needs to read data from every drive in the pool before it gives you the list of available drives, you have to wait 8 minutes for this process to finish, quite annoying but this only happens once in a blue moon and is not a high priority for me, but I would still like to find a solution for this...

I would assume that if you turn the 'slow down(stby) option' off, that all your drives would always be consuming full power unless the drives manage their own power mode (e.g. green drives with power management still enabled).
 
DasMarx said:
Still searching for a Controller.

I think the Areca 1680 should do the job but is actualy pretty expensive.

Does anyone know something about the cheaper LSI cards? Do they support spin-down in IT-mode?
Click to expand...

Everyone wants a low cost SAS HBA with spindown/power mgmt, get in line :) If such a card existed you would already see a massive thread on it.

LSI has intentionally gimped their lower end adapters, I've asked them directly.
 
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@treadstone Yeah if I turn off the the slow down it will just run at full power/RPM until I fit the power off time, I just wanted to ensure the drives were power off to see how long it takes them to be available on my controller, I've now set slow down to 3 min and power down to 10 min. Access was still so quick you almost couldn't tell if it was due to the drives being powered down or that lag you sometime get while using RDP, though I was able to access a file instantly it didn't seem to take but 1 sec, by no means anything like 10 sec.

Are all the drives connected to the expander? What happens if the drives are connected directly to the controller? 10 sec just seems like something is wrong especially from a controller that cost that much(it's almost as much as my Adaptec w/ less than have to ports) from a company that's know to have great products.
 
10 seconds is about the normal time and you will see this no matter what controller you use (RAID cards or motherboard based SATA ports) it doesn't matter, it's the drive and not the controller that causes this delay. I am referring to the time a HDD comes out of standby (platters are NOT spinning) to the time it is ready to be accessed (platters are at nominal spin speed and head calibration is complete) so that you can retrieve data from it. All platter based drives will have a delay, some longer than others, but it should be around the 8 to 12 second time frame. If you get access times less than a second, that would either be due to the data has been cached somewhere or the drive is not in standby. If your HDD supports slow-down mode, you will obviously see faster access times than from stand-by since the drive can already access data on the platters (although not at full speed) while it spins up the platters to nominal speed, but at the expense of still consuming more power during the slow-down mode compared to the stand-by mode. For a proper test, you would have to pick a random (preferably a large) file on any of your disks that are currently in stand-by mode to see how long that access time is.

Anyway, that's not really my problem. The problem is the sequential wake-up...

I have 48 out of the 50 drives connected via the HP SAS expanders. Two are directly connected to the motherboard (those are the PPU drives for FlexRAID). The two drives connected directly to the motherboard are controlled via the HDD sleep timer in the OS, this function does not work via the RAID controller going through the HP SAS expanders, so I had to use the spin-down setting in the RAID controllers BIOS.

What I am looking for is a setting to instruct the OS to send a wake-up (or even a read) command to all drives simultaneously to wake them up...
 
I have an Adaptec 5805 raid controller.
I also have an Adaptec 3805 raid controller. This controller does not support power management.

The controller supports power management of a raid array.

As far as I can tell, the 5805 will not power manage JBOD drives
 
Yeah I guess since the files i copied over for testing weren't that big they could have just been in the cache, on my last test I actually deleted the files I had copied onto the newly setup array and it only took a couple of seconds to complete. The array I was testing the power down feature on my new controller was made up of 7k/2000s.

You could make a script that wakes the drives and have it scheduled to run when you execute a shut down.


Asposium said:
I have an Adaptec 5805 raid controller.
I also have an Adaptec 3805 raid controller. This controller does not support power management.

The controller supports power management of a raid array.

As far as I can tell, the 5805 will not power manage JBOD drives
Click to expand...

Your 5805 should be the same as my 51645, I had put 2 mechanical drives in RAID 0 and 4 SSD-2 as JBODS the other not initialized turned on and setup and configured the power settings and all the logical drives I had set up and according the the adaptec storage manager all of them powered down at the set time (indicated both by the highlighted color on the physical drives and the event log).
 
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I'm seeing different behaviour than treadstone. With my drives connected to the Norco backplane (Hitachi 7200 rpm Deskstars) and ONLY(!) power connected, my drives do not spin up. When I subsequently try this with the Areca controller connected to the backplane, the drives _do_ spin up, yes all of them at once.

Norco was not helpful at figuring out whether their backplane is causing this, or whether the Areca controller is. Please remark I'm talking about this in the context of a cold boot.

note: when I connect a Hitachi drive directly to the motherboard, it spins up immediately (as it should). So either the backplane has an additional role to play (besides not grounding pin 11 on the power connector), or the Areca does something wrongly.
 
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Spinup is a good feature, but i can't find any information about spindown in the manual. :confused:
 
I am still using my SASUC8i.
I managed to spin my drives down by using a tool called HDDScan, which tells the drives to spindown by themselve.

Anyway. After searching for this topic i found this thread:
http://forums.servethehome.com/show...r-with-Drive-Spin-Down-ability-under-Windows&

It looks like the same Problem and the M1015 is one of the suggested controllers there.

Its actually newer than my SASUC8i and should therefore be better?
 
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