Need help on Areca 1680ix

[ic3m4n2005]

Hi,

i've got a 1680ix-16 since yesterday and build a Raid5 of three Samsung F1 1TB drives.
But i'm a bit confused about the resulting speed. Have a look at a few benchmarks:


OS is Server 08 SP2, stripe size 128 and write back enabled. Driver is the one from the cd, could check if newest one does any help when i got home from work. Or am i wrong and performance is as usual ?
Another question would be what strip size i should choose for my SAS Raid 0, on my old adaptec 31205 i chose 64k but i didn't good transfer speeds from it.

[Gogeta]

This looks about right for three F1s in RAID 5. Upgrade the driver to the newest from Areca's site, along with the firmware, etc for the adapter. As for stripe size, the generally accepted best practice is to test different stripe sizes against your expected workload to determine which will yield the best performance.

[Speederlander]

Yup, looks right.

[ic3m4n2005]

Ok now i'm relieved, thanks guys.
Firmware is already newest official, so no improvements here.

[pjkenned]

Looks right. Can you run Atto @ default on both arrays?

[ic3m4n2005]

Sure will do as soon as migrating Raid0 to 64k stripe size is complete, really cool function to do this "online" since i've got my os on this drives and a complete reinstall would be necessary otherwise.
It seems that i have problems with copying files from a single F1 or the raid 0 to raid 5. Bad speeds of under 50 mb/s and hangups seem to occur.


Driver was already the newest available. Will update here as soon as i can ( the migration is finished )

[ic3m4n2005]

Ok 64k stripe seems to smooth the graphs a lot, don't know if it's important.


Maybe a little slow for 2 15k drives, but i think there's not much i can do about.

Here we have my Raid 5 with three Samsung F1 1TB drives.


This should be ok ? Doesn't look like to me :/

[jcool]

No, something is definitely wrong. Your writes shouldnt be that low on the raid5.

This is my Adaptec 5405 with 4x WD6400AAKS in Raid 5, stripe 256K:



Your score would be a bit less since you are only running 3 drivges, but still sequential writes should be more like 200MB/s

[Speederlander]

Yeah, the RAID 5 writes are too low for the 1TB drives in RAID 5. You have everything (cache, read-ahead, etc) set correctly with the controller?

[ic3m4n2005]

I think so, this is from Raid config
Raid Level Raid 5
Stripe Size 128KBytes
Block Size 512Bytes
Member Disks 3
Cache Mode Write Back
Tagged Queuing Enabled
Volume State Normal

and this from system config
SATA NCQ Support enabled
HDD Read Ahead Cache enabled
Volume Data Read Ahead normal
HDD Queue Depth 32
Disk Write Cache Mode enabled

Since i cannot use 256k stripe size and 64k did good on the SAS drives, maybe i should use it here again ?? Yes i know it should decrease throughput not increase it, but what else can i do ?

P.S. there are two drivers on the cd and the internet, scsiport and storport, one of them i think it was storport installs without probles the other one gets you a warning while trying to install (aborted after that). So maybe i should try the other one even if windows says it's not the right one ?

[Speederlander]

storport yes. get the latest from the areca website.

Don't go smaller stripe for a giant RAID 5. Bigger is better.


Try this, break the array, make a 3 drive RAID 0 and post the results. See if those are as expected.

[jcool]

Good idea Speederlander,

a Raid 0 with 3 F1 should look similar to the ATTO I posted above, approx 300MB/s sustained read/write.

[ic3m4n2005]

As i said, driver and firmware are the latest (never used older ones).
In an hour or something Raid5 with 64k is finished, i could test it and create a Raid0 with the three F1's after it.

Does anyone know what's the temp limit is on this Raid CPUs ? I've got 70-75°C, since my X-Fi sits directly underneath it.

Thanks for helping with this so far guys, hope we can resolve this soon as my mood doesn't get any better since it's a 750 € controller and my old Adaptec 31205 worked better than it

[ic3m4n2005]

Ok little update:

Raid 5 with 64k stripe size (3x F1 1TB)


and Raid 0 with 128k stripe size (3x F1 1TB)


So there is something wrong. Will check each drive alone, maybe another cable to the controller, any other ideas for me ?

[jcool]

Yup there is def. something wrong with those writes. Unfortunately I never owned an Areca controller, but are you positive write cache is enabled? It just looks like it's not. Do you have a BBU attached?
Maybe it won't let you activate the write cache w/o BBU

[ic3m4n2005]

write cache is enabled, you can choose between write back and write through, even without BBU attached like in my case.

But i think i've found the solution, looked up the compatibility list on areca page and guess what....
Samsung
HD103UJ
1.0TB
PossibleProblem** (SATA HBAs)
Not Compatible (SAS HBAs)



Will try to disable ncq and see if it helps. Another curious thing happened as i was just formatting the single drives in windows. The last of the three was "formatting" and suddenly the controller was beeping like crazy. After rebooting HDD has vanished not only from windows but from controller too....oh man what is it with this

[Speederlander]

Perhaps incompatible drives, yes. Do try the NCQ settings and single drive benches though.

Another curious thing happened as i was just formatting the single drives in windows. The last of the three was "formatting" and suddenly the controller was beeping like crazy. After rebooting HDD has vanished not only from windows but from controller too....oh man what is it with this

A bad drive in the mix would explain a lot...

Do a 2 drive raid 0 with the other two drives. What does that look like?


I have 1680ix-16 and it works great. It's got a bandwidth cap for sata HDs around 500 to 600MB/s but it doesn't impact me.

I use WD RE3 1TB drives. No issues.

[ic3m4n2005]

Single drive performance going up and down like the other benches i made
But .... copy two big files 5gb and 1 gb from single drive to my raid 0 (with sas drives) was going smooth if you can trust windows. Never under 100mb/s.... wil try further witout ncq. Should i disable it for all drives ? Or is TCQ disabled for each of the F1's enough ?

[Speederlander]

Single drive performance going up and down like the other benches i made
But .... copy two big files 5gb and 1 gb from single drive to my raid 0 (with sas drives) was going smooth if you can trust windows. Never under 100mb/s.... wil try further witout ncq. Should i disable it for all drives ? Or is TCQ disabled for each of the F1's enough ?

Don't trust windows. Check each drive using hdtach/hdtune. First drive you check you should be checking all settings on the areca. Find the best performance if there is a best. Then simply rotate the drives at those same settings. If they aren't all roughly equal you either have a bad drive or incompatibility between the drives and the controller.

[ic3m4n2005]

HDD settings changed to this
Cache Mode Write Back
Tagged Queuing Disabled
and controller settings with NCQ enabled gets me this:


Just ATTO is ed up

[jcool]

Reads look ok, do use the "long bench" tho. What is up with the random access time? 16,7ms? That's terrible for a 7200rpm drive, should be 12,5-14 max.

Here's an ancient screenshot of a Raid 0 with 2x Samsung 1TB (the same ones you have), did that back when the controller was released, March 08 or something:



A little jumpy but that's about how it should look like with 2 drives. I'm with Speederlander, test all 3 drives and if one behaves differently, you may have a bad drive. Otherwise you have a faulty controller or, more likely, the drives are incompatible

[ic3m4n2005]

OK disabled NCQ on controller, now it looks like this


@jcool: areca says that the drives are incompatible...found it out yesterday. Now i'am trying to get around it, cause i have 6 of these F1's here...

[jcool]

Damn, tough luck. I hope you'll find a way to get around it.. maybe a new firmware for the drives?

[ic3m4n2005]

Already looked for a new firmware for the drives, but found nothing
Maybe it's possible to flash these to the Raid Version, but i don't know i anyone has ever tried.
Will do a Raid 0 with of drives later to see if i can get anywhere like shown above. I mean the picture i posted in post#22 was nearly ok


Edit:

Here is Raid 0 with 2x F1 @ 128k stripe size, HDD settings changed to this
Cache Mode Write Back
Tagged Queuing Disabled
and controller settings with NCQ disabled




Small glitch with ATTO, will i notice it ?

[Speederlander]

You could have a worse problem. I had originally bought 6x 640GB WD that turned out incompatible that worked in pass-through mode (mostly) and flaked out in any kind of array. I was lucky enough to be able to quickly sell them. Be careful what you do on this. You obviously have a LOT of space with those 1TBs. You could find that your (very large) array deep-sixes some day for no reason or data starts getting corrupted. That would be a lot of stuff to lose...

Personally I run all my WD RE3 1TB's in pass-through mode with checksums and ECC on each drive and then keep my OS and virtual machines in a RAID array. I get all the SATA connections from the x16 areca card, I get the benefit of big cache (I have the 2GB upgrade) for everything, I can quickly pull a drive for any reason and I can migrate to a new machine easily and without concern, and I'm speedy for OS and apps (though most apps are on a RAM drive). I really like this and I've never looked back.