Purchased one of these awhile ago as I was no longer able to run 3x dual port cards. New Ryzen boards don't have the slots and I had to run a video card now (which I use for transcoding so no biggie). I've noticed that I seem to bottleneck during parity checks and when Mover strikes I see it bogging down too. Could I have made a better choice? I need to support a max of around 24 drives, I've got an expander kicking around but have never used it. Would I be better off using that somehow with an existing  8i 2 port card? I see fairly significant IOWait times in NetData from time to time when really pushing data around but some of this could be my drives.

 

Can I do better for a reasonable cost?

 

Edit: reading some other posts it looks like I ought to have enough speed for spinning rust. Perhaps it's simply my drives after all but seeing IOwait numbers climb from time to time is pretty frustrating!

Edited December 26, 20196 yr by BLKMGK

16i card won't have bottleneck, it is a PCIe 2.0 x8 card.

Pls provide more detail, i.e. diagnostic, harddisk connect topology, disk speed test result etc.

Not a bad choice of HBA at all.

 

Do you have active cooling on it? The 16 port cards get hot as hell when pushing a lot of data, the 8 port ones are bad enough. Could cause throttling if you don't have a fan on it. remember, these were designed for the hurricane force cooling inside servers.

On 1/7/2020 at 11:54 AM, smegger68 said:

Not a bad choice of HBA at all.

 

Do you have active cooling on it? The 16 port cards get hot as hell when pushing a lot of data, the 8 port ones are bad enough. Could cause throttling if you don't have a fan on it. remember, these were designed for the hurricane force cooling inside servers.

I don't have active cooling on it, next I pull it out I'll see what I can do about adding some cooling. I have airflow as it's a SuperMicro chassis but it's not ducted over there. 

Watching things further I think the main issue could be the Mover process destroying performance when it runs. My cache drive is an M2 PCIE4 drive but when Mover fires the system becomes nearly unresponsive. Just frustrated I suppose as I bump the space limits on the 1TB cache drive moving videos around of late and performance tanks hard. I'm on 6.8 RC7 which has been stable but it looks like I'm two revs behind so perhaps there's help to be had there. I don't think I want the release 6.8 though as I think that was a kernel step backwards!

 

Parity checks seem low as well with a speed of 113MB/s - 100+TB of space with a 10TB parity drive. Takes a day to check but other than being "slow" it doesn't impact things too badly.