Z820 drives configuration

[wvillers]

Hi there,

There's a question that has been bothering me ever since I got my Z820:  how do you get the drives in the 4 sleds to be managed by the Intel C600 instead of the LSI SAS 2308?

I am in the same boat as many with SSD experiencing less-than-stellar SSD write performance (Samsung 830, and Micron m4 drives).  I don't seem to be able to get out of the MS driver, is there a way to force the Intel RSTe somehow?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Dan_WGBU]

The LSI SAS 2308 controller is connected to the 8 white HD connectors along the bottom edge of the motherboard.  4 cables from the drive cage (sleds) are plugged into the first 4 SAS connectors. 

The Intel C600 PCH is connected to the 6 HD connectors located near the PCH. 

  - Two dark gray ones are the AHCI 6Gb/s ports.  Optical drives are plugged into these ports as default.

  - Four light gray ports are the SCU 3Gb/s ports form the C600. 

If one unplugs the 4 cables from the white SAS connectors and plugs them into the light gray connectors, they will be connected to the C600 SCU controller. 

   - SATA drives should boot from these ports, but the boot order might have to be changed in BIOS. 

   - These SCU ports are 3Gb/s, not 6Gb/s like the LSI SAS 2308 ports.  With SSD's, one might see the difference.

If one is not using the LSI SAS 2308, it can be hidden by changing a BIOS setting (Device Security, I think), which disables the controller and thereby shortens the boot time. 

I have not personally tried this configuration, though, so I do not know if there are other changes needed. 

[wvillers]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the reply.  So I guess there isn't much of a point in doing so, that would actually degrade the performance.

Do you know why I wouldn't be able to use the Intel RSTe drivers?  I installed the update for the Z820, but no matter what I do, it's not letting me update the drivers to Intel ones...

[dv411]

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@TenTechLLC wrote:

I am in the same boat as many with SSD experiencing less-than-stellar SSD write performance (Samsung 830, and Micron m4 drives).

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Is this something that is SSD-specific? Benchmarked Samsung 840 Pro and Intel 520 series on both SAS and SATA ports, and getting very good speeds.

[wvillers]

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply...  What I am refering to is the abysmal I/O reported by tools like AS SSD.  If you look at the 4K read/write, it's quite low:

Similarly, the SSD Magician Benchmark shows some discrepencies with random reads:

Some suggest that using the Intel drivers bring back some performance...

[dv411]

Will have to do some more testing when I get a chance...

[wvillers]

Below are some tests ran on a 2x128GB m4 SSD RAID0 on the same internal LSI SATA ports:

[curt12345]

Hi,

Here are my two cents, as I have extensive experience with Z820 and Z800 running SSD's, raid, ect.

One such system at work was a Z800 with 8 Intel SSD's in Raid 0, 192GB of Ram, ect, this was a factory order and I had a long talk with the Z series engineers about this config before it was ordered for a Scientist that converts huge files from high speed camera and he wanted the fastest transfer speed from the 10gb link of the camera to the drives, along with 10gb link to a synology ds3211x for archival.

The bottom line on any of these workstations, is you have to buy a separate controller, I have had good luck with LSI's, onboard raid controllers for the most part are not the way to go if you are looking for high IO's and big time reads/writes.

I have gotten some amazing scores using a good LSI controller with the cache option, 9260 8i, we hit number two in the world on passmark for overall and blasted the disk score. Your scores look fine to me, the smaller ssd's don't do great anyways, even in raid, you won't see big numbers until you move up to min 256gb drives. I have experience with the Intels, Samsungs, both are great drives, cannot comment on the Crucials, but they would be number three, Samsing being number one.

Bottom line is that even though the Z820 has a 6gb interface onboard controllers(we ran PCI 6gb LSI controllers on Z800's as well as Z820's), you have to buy a dedicated raid card to really see SSD's fly.

[wvillers]

Thanks for your reply!  Seems like I might be looking into a RAID card then and move away from the 128GB SSDs, that one was in the plans already, thank you for giving me an excuse to do so 🙂

This RAID0 is to be used as scratch space for some heavy duty I/O engineering software (NASTRAN), so I'm trying to get the fastest possible as this impacts the run time significantly.  Any idea about the Samsung 840 vs. 840 Pro?

Also, it looks like you've done all the testing humanly possible, what do you think about the allocation unit size for NTFS?  4K?

[curt12345]

Really depends on the SSD's and what you want to do and how money you have. The best route with HP is buy the base unit smart buy that you want thats affordable, usually get the single processor Z820 with the 6 core I think its a 2630 with no videocard, then I get crucial memory, Samsung SSD's, 4 Icy Docks 2.5 too 3.5's and two of the the 2 into 1 2.5 adapters for the front, you mount the 4 in the normal drive spots with the icy docks the other four mount in front, get a good LSI controller kit that has the cables, usually 1 to 4 and they reach all the drives, but you also need 1 of the controller adapter cables to connect to the pre connected sata that usually connect to the onboard controllers, if you want more detailed information pm me you email address and I can send you over the details.

To me this is the most affordable way to build a rocket fast disk system with tons of ram on a Z820, without going crazy with expensive high end xeons, 1 is enough and with that many drives you will max out the controller most likely, especially if you get the fast path option with an LSi controller.