Hi UnRaiders:

I finally got my HL-8 (8-Bay) UnRAID setup with (8) Seagate Exos Enterprise HDDS and 2x 2TB NVMe Cache Drives. All drives passed the disk scans and parity was completed.

I have a mix of (2) 16TiB SAS, same brand, Seagate Exos and (6) 16TiB SATA drives connected to an HBA from Broadcom - LSI 9400-8i x8 lane PCI Express 3.1 SAS Tri-Mode Storage Adapter.

As you can see from the screen cap, I’m only getting 75-80 MB/s write performance even on the SAS drives; The ST16000NM002G_ZL23FDAT (sde) + ST16000NM002G_ZL23H06Y (sdc) are the SAS HDDs. I thought it was the HBA and looked around the guy at ‘Art of the Server’ had a video post about updating the really old FW and BIOs. So, I did that too only via the Windows StorCLI64.exe.

QQ: Shouldn’t the write performance be better on the SAS HDDs? What kind of write performance are SAS-only users seeing in UnRAID?

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StorCLI or StorCLI64.exe (Windows)

If you come upon this post, here’s the PRO tip, put the ‘Storcli64.exe’ in the root of your C:\ drive with the 3 BIOs you want to update.

Broadcom LSI 9400-8i FW Files:
mpt35sas_legacy.rom
mpt35sas_x64.rom
HBA_9400-8i_Mixed_Profile.bin

c:/storcli/storcli64 /c0 download file=HBA_9400-8i_Mixed_Profile.bin
Downloading image.Please wait…

CLI Version = 007.3503.0000.0000 Aug 05, 2025
Operating system = Windows 11
Controller = 0
Status = Success
Description = CRITICAL! Flash successful. Please power cycle the system for the changes to take effect
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c:/storcli/storcli64 /c0 download bios file=mpt35sas_legacy.rom

Downloading image. Please wait…

CLI Version = 007.3503.0000.0000 Aug 05, 2025
Operating system = Windows 11
Controller = 0
Status = Success
Description = Bios Flash Successful
_______________________________________________________________________

c:/storcli/storcli64 /c0 download efibios file=mpt35sas_x64.rom

Downloading image.Please wait…

CLI Version = 007.3503.0000.0000 Aug 05, 2025
Operating system = Windows 11
Controller = 0
Status = Success
Description = EFI Bios Flash Successful
_______________________________________________________________________

Hi, your diagnostics might provide more information.

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#array-write-modes

That might've helped but I decided to TEST a theory on this HBA and that is: Put (4) SAS HDDs one port with their confirmed negotiated 12GB/s confirmed lanes. Rebuild the parity and see what happens.

I'm getting much better write speeds but will that 200+/MB sec still be the same when cache is involved; it should but I need to wait until the Parity is Valid to test.