Swapping Drive To Another RAID Controller

BRRABill

I haven't heard of anyone actually trying this, but Dell just uses re-branded LSI controllers. Don't know how much firmware customization they've done, but I'd bet the drives could be moved between Dell and LSI controller cards.

Yes this surely would go into the "don't try at home" category, I think.

travisdh1

@BRRABill said:

@travisdh1 said:

I haven't heard of anyone actually trying this, but Dell just uses re-branded LSI controllers. Don't know how much firmware customization they've done, but I'd bet the drives could be moved between Dell and LSI controller cards.

Yes this surely would go into the "don't try at home" category, I think.

For sure.

dafyre

@BRRABill said:

@travisdh1 said:

I haven't heard of anyone actually trying this, but Dell just uses re-branded LSI controllers. Don't know how much firmware customization they've done, but I'd bet the drives could be moved between Dell and LSI controller cards.

Yes this surely would go into the "don't try at ~~home~~ work" category, I think.

Fixed it for you.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

@BRRABill said:

@travisdh1 said:

I haven't heard of anyone actually trying this, but Dell just uses re-branded LSI controllers. Don't know how much firmware customization they've done, but I'd bet the drives could be moved between Dell and LSI controller cards.

Yes this surely would go into the "don't try at ~~home~~ work" category, I think.

Fixed it for you.

I was about to say... more like "only" try this at home.

BRRABill

Oddly enough, when I do the same test on the same drives, on the "E" partition (which is located on the same RAID array as the "C" partition), I get the following results:

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 109.597 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 104.111 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.924 MB/s [ 469.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.498 MB/s [ 365.7 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 106.960 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 105.491 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.661 MB/s [ 161.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 1.243 MB/s [ 303.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [E: 52.6% (183.0/348.1 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/01/07 15:51:24
OS : Windows Server 2012 R2 [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)

BRRABill

Interesting tidbit you may or may not know. (I am sure you do.)

While the H310 DOES support single drives non-RAID), the H710 does NOT. You can use a single drive by creating a single member RAID0 array.

Not that you wouldn't always use RAID in a server. Just thought that was interesting.

travisdh1

@BRRABill said:

Interesting tidbit you may or may not know. (I am sure you do.)

While the H310 DOES support single drives non-RAID), the H710 does NOT. You can use a single drive by creating a single member RAID0 array.

Not that you wouldn't always use RAID in a server. Just thought that was interesting.

Good to know with my predilection for software raid, in that specific usage case an H310 will be just fine should I need another HBA.

BRRABill

@travisdh1 said:

Good to know with my predilection for software raid, in that specific usage case an H310 will be just fine should I need another HBA.

After being a member here at ML, I have sworn off the H310.

Going to sell mine on eBay rapido!

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

Interesting tidbit you may or may not know. (I am sure you do.)

While the H310 DOES support single drives non-RAID), the H710 does NOT. You can use a single drive by creating a single member RAID0 array.

Not that you wouldn't always use RAID in a server. Just thought that was interesting.

That's actually standard.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

@travisdh1 said:

Good to know with my predilection for software raid, in that specific usage case an H310 will be just fine should I need another HBA.

After being a member here at ML, I have sworn off the H310.

Going to sell mine on eBay rapido!

It's perfectly good if you don't want any hardware RAID from the controller

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said:

That's actually standard.

I figured.

Trying to help out the other rooks.

BRRABill

The results on my new EDGE SSD (from xByte) Raid 1 array:

MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1185.227 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 488.470 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 387.262 MB/s [ 94546.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 95.829 MB/s [ 23395.8 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 591.847 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 498.278 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 28.838 MB/s [ 7040.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 42.498 MB/s [ 10375.5 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [F: 0.0% (0.1/293.0 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2016/01/08 18:22:16
OS : Windows Server 2012 R2 [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)

BRRABill

This is good, right?

BRRABill

Another H710 question...

There are two areas I have questions on.

One is Read Policy.
The SATA array is set to "No Read Ahead"
The SSD array is set to "Adaptive Read Ahead"

One is Write Policy.
The SATA array is set to "Write Through"
The SSD array is set to "Write Back"

Are these settings determined by the type of disk?

scottalanmiller

I'm not sure if it detects and changes based on that or not.

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said:

I'm not sure if it detects and changes based on that or not.

Is it possible those settings were set by the H310 and just migrated to the H710?

What SHOULD the settings be? What do they even mean?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

@scottalanmiller said:

I'm not sure if it detects and changes based on that or not.

Is it possible those settings were set by the H310 and just migrated to the H710?

If you swapped the disks from one to the other, absolutely. Did you have to recreate the RAID arrays?