What the hell kind of monster have I created?!

D

Deimos

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 10, 2004
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I'm in China for 6 weeks so I grabbed some gear for a nice price:

LSI HBA 9211-8i (PCIe 2.0 4X, SATA6GB/s)
6 x 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs (550/500MB/s R/W per drive)

I got it set up in a test system while I'm still here, when I first started playing with it I was only getting 600MB/s, found that the slot I was using was only running at 2x, so after updating the FW on the card and shifting it to a 16x slot I get 1500MB/s (Atto R/W)

The only thing holding me back is the CPU but its only using a peak of 18% during the benchmark, its a lowly i3 3.3Ghz on the spanky new Z68 chipset.

Oh its fast, holy crap its fast, I loaded up a trial of Adobe CS5, it can launch the whole suite of apps in mere seconds!

Can't wait to get home and install it in my i7, anyone got any ideas just what I can use all this performance for? I'm considering sellig a couple of drives when I get back as it looks like 4 drives will max out the 4 PCIe lanes.
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It's a good $900NZ cheaper (for the whole kit), but you could probably pick it up even cheaper in the US.
 
By all means, enjoy your gadgets and tell us benchmarks.

But a title like "What the hell kind of monster have I created?!", seriously?
 
Your sequential speed is adequate, but with this low end raid card you're not getting what you could get in terms of IOPS, which is what SSDs are good at.

You need a card supporting fastpath.

You also need a good backup strategy.
 
hardware is not great in China but it is changing rapidly. Last year I went to my local computer mall (4 floors of little shop) and most places were showing off 24" monitors that didn't have HDMI and I had to special order pieces in from Shanghai and Beijing. This year wen I went I was seeing 6 screen set-ups all over the place. I went to my high-end shop and they were working on a few dual socket, liquid cooled gaming builds with multiple SSDs, tri-fire and a custom racing chair for another customer. This summer I went to the US of of course I picked up most of my build in MicroCentre. Prices in China are on par with CA & US at full price. Not many Chinese have much money, so most only have laptops. The ones that do have money don't care about cost and go [H]. The 7970 is about $650 USD right now.
 
the listed RW speeds on the drive specs are theoretical max, and are given only in the context of raw drive performance. Any file system will have it's own overhead that must be taken into account.

The card is only x4 in it's host connection. You've got 6 drives attached. I'd suspect that you'd see almost the same performance on only 4 drives. If you want it to go faster, you'd probably need to go up to something like a 9260-8i w/BBU.


the i7 won't help with throughput, but CPU utilization should be a bit lower.
 
sabregen said:
the listed RW speeds on the drive specs are theoretical max, and are given only in the context of raw drive performance. Any file system will have it's own overhead that must be taken into account.

The card is only x4 in it's host connection. You've got 6 drives attached. I'd suspect that you'd see almost the same performance on only 4 drives. If you want it to go faster, you'd probably need to go up to something like a 9260-8i w/BBU.


the i7 won't help with throughput, but CPU utilization should be a bit lower.
Click to expand...

LSI 9211-8i is a PCIe 2.0 x8 card. If you have an x4 limitation it is either motherboard related or you have a funky card. You may have an x16 physical running in x4 mode.

As a thought, I was able to ATTO ~1.8GB/s write and just over 2.1GB/s read on 8x first gen SF-1200 series drives even when the old 9211-8i iR firmware had performance issues in that scenario.

Your performance is not limited to 1.5GB/s in ATTO due to the 9211-8i and six SSDs, and realistically your CPU is fine there too.
 
pjkenned said:
LSI 9211-8i is a PCIe 2.0 x8 card. If you have an x4 limitation it is either motherboard related or you have a funky card. You may have an x16 physical running in x4 mode.

As a thought, I was able to ATTO ~1.8GB/s write and just over 2.1GB/s read on 8x first gen SF-1200 series drives even when the old 9211-8i iR firmware had performance issues in that scenario.

Your performance is not limited to 1.5GB/s in ATTO due to the 9211-8i and six SSDs, and realistically your CPU is fine there too.
Click to expand...

Hmm, you're right, I didn't realise it was an 8x card so in theory I should be getting better perf out this setup, I did have issues on the older firmware with perf only being slightly better than a single drive, I'm going to check online to see if there is some kind of util that can tell me how many lanes are in use, afaik the slot is 16x capable...

pics:





Atto:

 
OK, checked with sandra and it is definitely running at 8x v2.0 so not sure why the performance is so "bad"...

according to the product page the card can do 350,000 IOPS, each drive can do 85,000 IOPS (which is 510,000 IOPS total).

I checked firmware on everything, afaik everything is up to date, I think I'll try updating the mobo firmware but I doubt it will make much difference.

Anyone got any suggestions?
 
Aesma said:
Your sequential speed is adequate, but with this low end raid card you're not getting what you could get in terms of IOPS, which is what SSDs are good at.

You need a card supporting fastpath.

You also need a good backup strategy.
Click to expand...

350,000 IOPS, I wouldn't consider that low end by any stretch, especially a workstation (or toy).

I have a server with RAID 5 12TB and plenty of backups so thats all covered, I don't keep anything that I can't afford to lose on my workstation.
 
It looks like the 9211-8i was a not so great choice, from what I have read the card has issues running a raid array larger than 4 disks, apparently the two ports don't play nice together, I'm going to try 4 disks on one port to see how it goes, this was going to be my intended setup anyways, I'll bench it and post again later...
 
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