HBA thoughts and considerations

[aglyons]

Hey all!

 

I've been running UR on a dell R510 with a PERC310 HBA for a while now. I understand that this card is not considered the go-to choice, but at the time I had no clue and went with the board that was included. I was told that it would work, and it does; just not 100%. More like 99.99%.

 

That being said I recently started a parity swap with a new drive. I've been watching the process and the read/writes are about 140-200MB/s between the two drives. It got me thinking that the HBA might be holding the servers performance back from what it could be.

 

UR doesn't recognize the PERC310 as a PERC310. Instead it loads the Broadcom / LSI MegaRAID SAS 2008 [Falcon] (rev 03) driver according to the hardware report.

 

So my questions are;

 

1. Can I/Should I flash the HBA with alternate FW to allow for better integration with UR
2. Does the PERC310 have hardware limitations that are not allowing the system to run as it could
3. If flashing is not an option and the PERC310 is a bottleneck, suggestions on an alternate controller
4. I assume swapping the controller might cause issues with the UR license on the flash. What's the process to correct that.
5. I also assume that swapping the controller, as long as all the drives are connected after, should retain the parity.

 

If I am off base anywhere by all means steer me in the right direction.

 

Thanks all!

 

 

 

PS. The more I am learning about UR, Linux, VM's and docker the more fun I am having!!

[JorgeB]

Flashing to IT mode would be better, note that it may change the disks ID and require a new config, but it shouldn't based on the screenshot.

 

As for performance, the controller won't usually bottleneck 8 disks, it will SSDs, since you have 10 disks I assume there's an expander backplane? The speeds you are showing are certainly not being limited by the controller, check if the disks are linking at SATA3 speed.

[aglyons]

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Flashing to IT mode would be better, note that it may change the disks ID and require a new config, but it shouldn't based on the screenshot.

 

As for performance, the controller won't usually bottleneck 8 disks, it will SSDs, since you have 10 disks I assume there's an expander backplane? The speeds you are showing are certainly not being limited by the controller, check if the disks are linking at SATA3 speed.

 

All disks are neg at either SATA3.1 or STATA3.3. All 6Gpbs.

 

I checked the disk specs and they are all capable of 240MBs read/write. I guess that all depends on the files that are being read/written. Smaller files would most def hinder the drives from hitting top speeds before the operation finished.

 

That being said, I ran unbalance on the drive I pulled out first to get as much off as I could. That was running the move at about 48MBs read. reconstruct write was enabled which is supposed to speed things up. And I understand that the Fuse parity calculation operation is intensive but my dual Xeon CPUs and 96GB of RAM were practically sleeping when all of this is happening. So I don't get where the slowdown comes from.

[JorgeB]

38 minutes ago, aglyons said:

I guess that all depends on the files that are being read/written.

Also where they are being written to, disk max speed slows down a lot as you start writing to the innermost sectors, often about half the max speed on the outer ones.

 

39 minutes ago, aglyons said:

That being said, I ran unbalance on the drive I pulled out first to get as much off as I could. That was running the move at about 48MBs read. reconstruct write was enabled which is supposed to speed things up.

Moving data on the array will always be much slower, due to parity updates, and turbo write doesn't work when multiple disks are being accessed.

 

[aglyons]

7 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Flashing to IT mode would be better

 

Any simple approaches to flashing floating around the forums, or should I just go with the Truenas doc that I found?

 

https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/cross-flashing-dell-h310-h710-mini-to-it-mode.166/

 

 

 

[foo_fighter]