Bad performance - DELL H730 Card - SSD build

PERC_H730

Cadet
Joined
Apr 4, 2020
Messages
1
Hello,

I'm posting here because I don't have a clue of what's not working well with my current project.

So basically i'm building a NAS with only 2 TB SATA SSD drives, I currently only have 4 of them but I plan to get 6 or 7 of those guys.
Since I'm trying to get this in a small micro ATX case, I'm using a PERC H730 Raid card put in HBA mode. This runs on a LSI 3108 chip which should be good enough to run SATA SSD drives.

I currently have 2 SSD models, 2 Samsung 860 PRO and 2 Crucial MX300, the first one contains only SLC chips, and the second one does have something like 20 GB SLC cache before starting to use its TLC chips.

I'm running this on a B450 motherboard with a Ryzen 3600 and 32 GB of RAM (i've also tested it out on my gaming PC, a Ryzen 3800x, 32 GB of RAM and a X470 motherboard and I got the same following results).

So basically when plugging any of the SSDs on the H730 CARD running the last DELL firmware (25.5.6) I get the following performance :

bad raid card.PNG
On this test, using a MX300 SSD I don't even bother using a big test file, so the writing should all go to the SLC cache of the SSD which allows something like 500 MB/sec writing speed.

I've tried of course with the SSD directly linked to the motherboard, here is the result :

good SATA.PNG
Even when using a 64 GB test file it is still much better than through the H730 raid card :

good SATA_64.PNG

So, since I got 2 ports on the H730 raid card I've of course tried switching port, switching cables : still the same bad performance.

I've even put the H730 in RAID mode,

RAID 0 : about 440 MB / sec (close to 2 times 230)
RAID 5 : about 230 MB / sec

Any idea what's going on and why this H730 is such a bottleneck ? It should be able on paper to run 12 gbit/s SAS SSDs, that's something way more demanding then my 6 gbit/s SATA SSDs...

Do I miss something ? Would flashing to a LSI firmware help ?

Thanks for any advice.
 

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rakurtz

Cadet
Joined
Feb 2, 2021
Messages
1
Hey PercH730 -

we are using the same Controller and encounter terrible performance in HBA mode. We could do extensive testing since we have 3 servers with almost little different setups (same controller though).
Server 1: 960 GB SSD + 6 x 4TB Toshiba Disks
Server 2: Same as Server 1
Server 3: Same 960 GB Toschiba Disk but additional 6 x 8 TB HGST Disk

All controller and disk settings are the same!

The only disks performing normal are the HGST Disks. While the SSD also on Server 3 can only read/write with about 380 MB/s.

I don't get it. Could you solve your problem eventually?!
 
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