Upgrading HBA anyone know the speed increase?

[Maticks]

Hi Unraid pplz,

 

I have a LSI 9201-16i at the moment total of 15 disks second cache pool included or 2 Parity and 11 Data Drives on just the array.

WD Red and Ironwolf 4T and 8T disks.

I am looking to move onto a 9305-16i and recable all the SATA disks with the different adaptor type.

 

Anyone have an idea of what speed increase ill see on the array or anyone have a 9305-16i and advise what speeds they see on their disks.

Considering moving to 10T or 12T disks but the rebuilt times at the moment are rather long any increase is just going to make that process even longer.

[Vr2Io]

21 minutes ago, Maticks said:

WD Red and Ironwolf 4T and 8T disks.

How long does rebuild take, if less then 10hrs (4TB) 20hrs (8TB), then it is normal.

[Maticks]

8TB around 20-24 hours.

a faster LSI card i am assuming will cut that down with faster disk accesses.

[Vr2Io]

15 minutes ago, Maticks said:

8TB around 20-24 hours.

a faster LSI card i am assuming will cut that down with faster disk accesses.

So, it seems normal ( even little bit slow ). I doubt if change to 9305-16i would help much.

Pls confirm 9201-16i have put in a PCIe slot have 8x PCIe 2.0 bandwidth.

 

Or simple observation, if rebuild in first 10min, the highest speed rebuild at 180MB/s+ then it is not HBA issue.  

Edited October 12, 2023 by Vr2Io

[PlayLoud]

25 minutes ago, Maticks said:

8TB around 20-24 hours.

a faster LSI card i am assuming will cut that down with faster disk accesses.

 

That sounds normal to me. When I had only 10TB Red drives (1 Party, 4 Data), I think it took me ~19 hours. This was on an LSI 9207-8i, so no bottleneck on the HBA.

Your 4TB drives are probably slowing you down a bit as they'll be reaching the inner part of the platter (slower) while the 8TB drives are still on the outside (faster). You probably notice after you pass up the 4TB mark, your speed goes back up a bit as the 8TB drives are no longer being bottlenecked by the slower 4TB drives.

[Maticks]

57 minutes ago, PlayLoud said:

 

That sounds normal to me. When I had only 10TB Red drives (1 Party, 4 Data), I think it took me ~19 hours. This was on an LSI 9207-8i, so no bottleneck on the HBA.

Your 4TB drives are probably slowing you down a bit as they'll be reaching the inner part of the platter (slower) while the 8TB drives are still on the outside (faster). You probably notice after you pass up the 4TB mark, your speed goes back up a bit as the 8TB drives are no longer being bottlenecked by the slower 4TB drives.

 

Yeah i do notice that, so what you guys are saying apart from a fancy newer LSI card and fresh cables. It won't really make any difference in speed with this many drives and 4T disks still in my system?

[PlayLoud]

2 hours ago, Maticks said:

 

Yeah i do notice that, so what you guys are saying apart from a fancy newer LSI card and fresh cables. It won't really make any difference in speed with this many drives and 4T disks still in my system?

 

Since your times seem normal, I don't think you'll get any meaningful speed increase with a faster HBA. The one your looking at isn't cheap either.

 

Your current limit appears to be the speed of your drives. It's really the nature of the beast. If your want fast parity rebuilds, you'll have to use all lower capacity drives that can get through the entire drive faster (not worth the storage tradeoff), or you can get at least some speed increase by getting rid of your smallest drives to keep the first half of your parity check faster. The most efficient route is using all the same drive size, so that you're not getting that slow down as the smaller drives finish on the slow part of the platter. If 8TB is your parity, you could replace all your 4TB with 8TB, thought it always hurts to spend money on a drive and only gain 4TB. In addition, getting higher performance drives (maybe WD Ultrastars instead of Reds) for all your drives would speed up the process. But even then, you're only talking about shaving a few hours at most.

 

Unless you're planning on expanding beyond 16 drives, I think your current HBA is fine.

[itimpi]

If you are having problems with how long some of the array level operations take then you might want to consider installing the Parity Check Tuning plugin to at least offload the times those operations are running to be run in increments outside prime time.  This give you better prime time performance at the cost of the total duration being longer.