LSI SAS2308-IR poor performance

[mike_ele]

I installed on the workstation, Win10 64bit pro on 4 Hdd Seagate Barracuda 750GB ST3750330AS 3Gbps connected to the SAS2308-IR controller and configured in Raid10. I waited for the complete initialization of the Raid10. By copying big video files to and from the Raid10 Virtual Disk, I got unexpected performances: maximum transfer speed around 75MB/s.

I also tried to install Fedora Workstation 28 64bit to repeat the test of data transfer speed to and from the Virtual Disk Raid10: results more or less similar.
To check if the problem is on the LSI 2308-IR controller I installed win10 pro 64bit on an HDD Seagate Barracuda 2TB ST2000DM001 (I did not use one of the previous hdd to not destroy the raid10) connected to the Sata0 of the Intel C602 chiset. In this case the video file copy to and from the disk has obtained much higher speeds, well over 100MB/s.
Currently the revisions of Bios and Fw are:

MB 158B Bios V. 3.94;
LSI 2308-IR MPT2BIOS 7.35.02.00 (2014.03.12), FW 18.00.00.00-IR, NVDATA 11.00.00.08;
ST3750330AS FW V. SD1A

Looking on the web I saw very different results for similar hardware configuration:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/6228/asrock-x79-extreme11-review-pcie-30-x16x16x16x16-and-lsi-8way-sa...

Thank you

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

the Lsi 2308 (Mustang) ROC (Raid On Chip) is available in numerous configurations. however the most importamt one is does the 2308 that you have use onboard cache.

most motherboards, and many addin cards using the 2308 chip will not have cache, as such they will be slower and usually (but not allways) have no raid 5 feature set. those that do lack cache and have raid 5 will be very slow due to the lack of onboard cache the dell perc H310 is one such card and the HP z820 is another motherboard based 2308 without cache that has raid 5 as a option

broadcom (who bought LSI) has firmware for retail LSI models which use the 2308 chip in both Raid and non raid  versions

I"R" firmware is Raid capable  and  "IT" is HBA mode (host bus adapter)

since you are doing raid 10 which is disk mirroring and disk striping combined you should be using the "IT" firmware not the "IR" firmware  on your card

which model card do you have with the 2308 chip on it?

is the card in a PCI-e 2.0 /3.0 8x  slot?

your comparision link has pci-e 3.0 bus and is using MLC based SSD's which is not a valid comparision!!!

replace your mech based drives with SSD's and you to will have much much faster xfer speeds!!

your ST3750330AS drive is a sata 3gbps drive 7200rpm drives should be SATA 6gbps 7200/10k rpm