Will parity check speeds improve with upgrade?

[ashman70]

I am going to be upgrading one of my servers from an older socket 1366 board to a slightly newer socket 2011 board, the Asrock  EP2C602. I will be reusing my current HBA which I believe is a Dell H310 which I think is only running in an 8x PCIe slot. I am hoping by putting it in a 16x PCIe slot it that the parity check speeds should improve. Right now a parity check takes between 34-36hrs to complete.

[JorgeB]

It may improve but not because of the slot, the H310 is x8 only, so it won't be faster on an x16 slot.

[Alphahelix]

I went from a tyan S7012 (2 X5660) to a supermicro X9dri-lnf4 (2 E5-2690) I got a nice speed increase. But I would not upgrade because of that alone.

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[ashman70]

1 hour ago, Alphahelix said:

Can you quantify 'a nice speed increase'? Did your parity check time get cut in half?

 

[JorgeB]

Is the upgrade for the 1st server on your sig? I see 30 disks, assume there's one or more expanders, how are all the disks connected, knowing that I can approximately calculate max usable bandwidth.

[ashman70]

Yes the first server. I have a single Dell H310 with one connection to the backplane on the back and one to the backplane on the front.

 

This is from an email I received from SuperMicro tech support last year regarding my chassis. I honestly can't remember if I left things in the first configuration or changed it to the second to see. If I did change to the second method, I didn't see a change in speed. I guess I'll know in about a week when I get my new board and swap it in.

 

  Backplane support 2 cables connection from HBA or raid controller to backplane which would help to increase data transfer bandwidth. However, it will depend on raid controller able to support it.

 

Front backplane, BPN-SAS2-846EL1 contain total of 3 miniSAS (SFF8087) ports. Rear backplane, BPN-SAS2-826EL1 contain total of 2 miniSAS (SFF8087) ports.

 

You could make the connect from HBA to backplanes in two ways.

 

The way you have done is one way. One port on HBA card connect to front backplane, PRI_I0 (orPRI_J1/PRI_J2) port. Another port on HBA card connect to rear backplane, PRI_I0 (orPRI_J1/PRI_J2) port.

 

The other way is, using two cables connecting 2 ports on HBA card to front backplane PRI_J1 and PRI_J2. Use single cable connecting front backplane, Pri_J0 port to rear backplane, PRI_J0 port.
 

Prefer the way you have done the cable connection to backplane.

Edited September 15, 2018 by ashman70

[Alphahelix]

In my case i went from (if memory serves me) arround 28 hours for parity check (8TB) to little over 24 hours.

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[JorgeB]

I think I remember that you changed to the second option to dual link the 1st expander, 2nd expander would then be single linked to the 1st one.

If that's the case the usable available bandwidth is between 2600MB/s to 3000MB/s, likely closer to 2600MB/s, so parity check, if not limited by other factors like CPU, should start at around 85MB/s.

If you're using the recommended tunables and it's lower than that you're likely CPU limited.

If not CPU limited easiest way to improve parity check performance would be to get a PCIE 3.0 HBA like the 9207-8i, assuming the new board supports PCIE 3.0, using a single 9207 instead of the H310 would increase max posdible speed to around 145MB/s, keeping the H310 connected to the smaller expander and the 9207 to the larger one would allow up to 185MB/s.