Re: serveRAID M5014 SAS

Grzegorz Jaśkiewicz wrote:
> Does anyone here have any bad experiences with the RAID card in subject ?
> This is in an IBM server, with 2.5" 10k drives.
>
> But we seem to observe its poor performance in other configurations as
> well (with different drives, different settings) in comparison with -
> say, what dell provides.
>

Older ServeRAID cards have never been reported as very fast. They were
an OK controller if you just want to mirror a pair of drives or
something simple like that. Their performance on larger RAID arrays is
terrible compared to the LSI products that Dell uses.

However, the M5014 *is* an LSI derived product, with a proper
battery-backed write cache and everything. I'm not sure if older views
are even useful now. Few things to check:

-Is the battery working, and the write cache set in write-back mode?
-Has read-ahead been set usefully?
-Did you try to use a more complicated RAID mode than this card can handle?

Those are the three easiest ways to trash performance here.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
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